“No moon, sun, diamond, hands —fingertip, dot, ray, gauze, sea.pine green, pink glass, eye,mine, eraser, mud, mother, I am coming.”

“What part of your duty am I?"He squeezed her hand. "You're the ray of sun at the center of the storm.”

“She took off her dark glasses and squinted at me. It was as though her eyes were shattered prisms, the dots of blue and gray and green like broken bits of sparkle.”

“All the light of the day, fleeing the earth, seemed for one brief moment to take refuge in the sky; pink clouds spiralled round the full moon that was as green as pistachio sorbet and as clear as glass; it was reflected in the lake.”

“Into the bleak mud, Time's books sink. Our eye-oh-yous erased in rot and error.”

“THERE IT IS,’ my mother says, and what she means is that the dot we’ve been nearing for weeks, the one that’s been growing into a larger dot with two smaller dots circling it, has now become even larger than that, growing from a dot to a disc, shining back the light from its sun, until you can see the blue of its oceans, the green of its forests, the white of its polar caps, a circle of colour against the black beyond.”