“Forever is the most dizzying word in the English language. The idea of staying in one place forever was like standing at the border of a foreign country, peering over the fence and trying to imagine what life might be like on the other side, and life on the other side was frankly unimaginable.”

“She slipped so easily into the folds of his life”

“Michaela wasn't someone Lilia ever trusted, but there was a certain kinship; she shared Lilia's suspicion that the world might prove, in the end, to have been either a mirage or a particularly elaborate hoax. ”

“Place in writing often exists at that intersection between the reality of place and one's imagination about that place -- what one believes, hopes, or imagines about the various possibilities of oneself in that place.”

“I don't want balance. What I want is the brick! I want to find the one thing in my life that, if I get that right, it doesn't matter what the world throws onto the other side of the scale.”

“The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side, The one the other will include With ease, and you beside.”

“I knew clearly that I could not rebuild my life or put it back together in any way. I had no idea what might lie on the other side of this place. I only knew that the before-world was gone forever.”