“Somewhere a bird sang, its chant hanging plaintive and melancholy in the still air...I think it's a sort of lark or something. Our tradition has it that they sing with the voices of lost lovers. If the stars are smiling on them, you will hear its mate call back in a moment.”

“Cat wrinkled her nose. "No, thank you.""Take," the rais told her. "Is good." He picked one up and held it out, and when she hesitated, thrust it at her with greater insistence. "With my people, hosbitality important. To refuse is insult."She took a small bite. Sweetness flooded her mouth so that she gasped. It was not in the least what she had expected, for it tasted remarkably like the preserved medlars the cook bottled each autumn from Kenegie's orchard. "Oh..." She took the rest whole, saliva breaking from the corner of her mouth.Al-Andalusi looked on, eyebrow cocked sardonically. "Is fig," he said. "In some tradition it was the friut Eve gave to Adam from the Tree of Knowledge.""In the Bible that was an apple!""In our tradition, according to the Qu'ran, it was apple also. And when Adam swallowed mouthful od fruit, it stuk in throat and made lump all men have.""The Adam's apple!" Cat cried, astonished. "We call it that as well.""We are, perhaps, not such strangers to each other as you think.”

“The heart's actionsare neither the sentence nor its reprieve. Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite. One bird singing back to another because it can't not.”

“Yet happiness isn't something you chase, it's something you are. It's something you think, it's something you believe.”

“The scene before her flattened, lost one of its dimensions, and the noise dribbled irrelevantly down its face. Something was coming. This moment, this very experience of it, seemed only the thinnest gauze. She sat in the audience thinking--someone here has cancer, someone has a broken heart, someone's soul is lost, someone feels naked and foreign, thinks they once knew the way but can't remember the way, feels stripped of armor and alone, there are people in this audience with broken bones, others whose bones will break sooner or later, people who've ruined their health, worshipped their own lives, spat on their dreams, turned their backs on their true beliefs, yes, yes, and all will be saved. All will be saved. All will be saved.”

“There are days when I think there really is some huge great tapestry of a plan out there and we're all woven into it - this fabulous, complex pattern of life and death, full of recurring motifs and waves of color, and we're each one tiny thread in the weave.”

“Every moment has its pleasures and its hope.”