“Supposedly she’d died, but here she was again–somewhat changed, but you couldn’t kill her. Not when the truest part of her hadn’t even been born.”

“There was a part of her she hadn’t yet allowed to be born because it was too beautiful for this place”

“She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her.”

“If illness didn’t kill you, you died of bad luck.”

“...I felt the stirring even of parts of me that had been dead since childhood, that sense of the child as a sort of antenna stuck in the middle of an infinite expanse of possibilities. ”

“. . . things whose perishing had been arrested by their power to make her love them.”

“Down the hall came the wife. She was glorious, burning. She didn't know yet that her husband was dead. We knew. That's what gave her such power over us. The doctor took her into a room with a desk at the end of the hall, and from under the closed door a slab of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process, diamonds were being incinerated in there. What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I've gone looking for that feeling everywhere.”