“There's a space in me. It's a dead space. I know that, because I can't feel anything. But that's what hurts, the nothingness. It's agony.”

“It's so stupid because all I wanted was space and now that I have it, there's this part of me that's achingly lonely I could die.”

“That's what I love about fire, how it would kill me as quick as anybody else. How it can't know I'm its mother. It's so beautiful and powerful and beyond feeling anything for anybody, that's what I love about fire.”

“I look all-woman on the outside, but inside I’m empty. Dead. A vast space of nothingness.”

“Imagination is what I have when I'm on my own. Pretending is what I do in the world. There's a space in between those two spaces, maybe like the space between life and death, but it's hard to navigate, and even harder to understand. Then again, I sometimes think that maybe that's just the way life is, and what I've been searching for is something different.”

“John Updike, in that book you gave me, he said the dead make space. Do you know what I think? Updike doesn't know dick about what it's like to be a homicide cop in Baltimore.”