“But there are still times that I talk to the sky, and by the sky i mean Jim. Try to explain the life i have now to the same color blue that used to flash in his eyes.”

“156. Why is the sky blue? -A fair enough question, and one I have learned the answer to several times. Yet every time I try to explain it to someone or remember it to myself, it eludes me. Now I like to remember the question alone, as it reminds me that my mind is essentially a sieve, that I am mortal.157. The part I do remember: that the blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it. As one optics journal puts it, "The color of any planetary atmosphere viewed against the black of space and illuminated by a sunlike star will also be blue." In which case blue is something of an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire.”

“The winter sky has already turned black, but I could still see Wesley's gray eyes in the darkness. They were exactly the color of the sky before a thunderstorm.”

“Toward the evening the sky took on the same color as the fires. Everything took on that color, the sky, the buildings, even the ground. Just before the sunset the red in the sky would deepen to the color of blood. I imagined the sky bleeding. I imagined the heavens suffering with us. To this day a red sunset reminds me of the bleeding sky of Auschwitz.”

“I had the whole sky in my eyes and it was blue and gold.”

“This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes.”