“That the sun still rose the next morning was incredibly unjust. Someone good had died. People still woke up, had breakfast, went to work, and it was wrong. Flower petals still opened in the sun’s early light, and animals still grazed the day away, their minds untroubled. Someone good had died and the world had the audacity to move on.”

“Why couldn't people's insides match their outsides? The world would be such a wonderful place if the nicer someone was, the more beautiful they became.”

“Yukiko steered the subject away from sex as fast as she could. She was still occasionally woken by nightmares about the day her father had tried to sit her down for "the talk".”

“...and history felt like a conjuring trick. All of this had been in plain view the entire time, but only now did the magician allow Joey to see it all.”

“I'm listening to someone give up. Someone I knew—someone I liked. I'm listening... but still, I'm too late.”

“Yeah, and I honestly don’t hold it against you anymore. Ben’s an amazing guy, and I bet losing someone like that hurt pretty damn bad. You both paid for what happened, which is a shame, because love shouldn't have a price.”

“Instead, I woke early the next morning, before sunrise, and went out into the world. I walked past my car. I stepped onto the pavement, still warm from the previous day’s sun. I started walking. In bare feet, I traveled upriver toward the place where I was born and will someday die. At that moment, if you had broken open my heart you could have looked inside and seen the thin white skeletons of one thousand salmon.”