“She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar.”

“I felt like time was a great sea, and I was floating on the back of a turtle, and no sails broke the horizon.”

“If this was a sandalwood pyre she would have thrown herself in and this paper she'd become would have caught fire and she and him could sail away like two birds.”

“(letters) They were like a kelp forest, they cast a weird green light, you could get lost there, become tangled and drown....still eyeing the letters like Portuguese man-of-wars floating on the innocent sea.”

“Now was too big, like a giant dark planet coming up over the horizon. she wanted then. That's what he'd seen that day, a brightness with darkness all around, watching her, as if she were glamorous, as if she were a rare and mysterious creature.”

“At night she began cooking things in the kitchen, things too strange to mention. She steeped oleander in boiling water, and the roots of a vine with white trumpet flowers that glowed like faces. She soaked a plant collected in moonlight from the neighbors’ fence, with little heart-shaped flowers. Then she cooked the water down; the whole kitchen smelled like green and rotting leaves. She threw out pounds of the wet-spinach green stuff into somebody else’s dumpster. She wasn’t talking to me anymore. She sat on the roof and talked to the moon.”

“His guitar bore his longing up into the darkness like sparks, a music profound in its objectless desire, beautiful beyond solace or solution”