“The stars are always up in the sky...then when it is perfectly black, they feel less vulnerable and out they come.”

“Your superhuman power was to be able not to feel. Is it there inside everybody, this self that comes out while you are in captivity? You become the closest approximation of yourself that can tolerate living there.”

“The ground was silvery, as if some stars had fallen there.”

“I closed my eyes and the roof was gone. I could see the stars while the piano tinkled. I could see Jupiter and it was blue, and Neptune was silver like a tennis ball sprayed silver. I could reach out and touch it, like cold water.”

“My breath in the cold air was bleach that accidentally spilled on a black t-shirt.”

“Sometimes when you are standing still and it’s snowing, you think that you hear music. You can’t tell where it’s coming from either. I wondered if we all really did have a soundtrack, but we just get so used to it that we can’t hear it anymore, the same way that we block out the sound of our own heartbeat.”

“Jules and I were tiny people. We were delicate. We were almost destroyed. We were vulnerable. Like nerds in a school yard of bullies, we could have traded our stamps and cards of extinct animals. That’s the kind of people we would be if our situation were different.”