“Then she decided she was ready to die.But before she did, she asked the poets to record these momentsin song, and the architects to carve the song in marble,and the marble to be extracted from the most secret veinsof the earth and placed where no man could see it,because that is the nature of love, because one walks alonethrough the ruins of the heart, because the young must sleepwith their eyes open, because the angels tremblefrom so much beauty, because memory moves in orbitsof absence, because she holds her hands out in the rain,and rain remembers nothing, not even how it became itself.”

“See, the thing is I didn't think that that song would get much attention because it's such a personal song to me. I just wrote it about my childhood, and I didn't know how that would read on an album. But it's been everybody's favorite song. I didn't tell my mom. It was a total secret. So I wrote it in secret and then decided to record it secretly, so she had no idea that the song was recorded. My producers sent me the track and I synched it up to all my baby videos and I played it for her one Christmas Eve, and she bawled her eyes out. She didn't even think that it was my song. She didn't think there was any way for me to record a song without her knowing.”

“I don’t want to ever see her again, because I want to always remember her as she was—young and beautiful. She won't remember, because she was 88 when we met and suffering from dementia.”

“You don't love a girl because of beauty. You love her because she sings a song only you can understand.”

“She once told me that she loved me because I was the only thing she could hear. She can feel the vibration of the strings through the carved vessel of her instrument, but I am inside her. I am a song soaked into each bone of her secret body where the world has not been able to wander.”

“Naomi remembered all the times she had decided to daven because she saw someone else with an open siddur, when she had made a bracha before eating because someone else did.... She couldn't imagine how hard it was to do these things on your own. But at the same time, there must be a certain freedom that came with it. You would know that you were doing the mitzvot because you wanted to.”