“The church smelled like leftover tears. Sadness was tucked into corners and hidden under beams and pasted so thick on the walls that it was hard to breathe.”

“They wept no animal's tears. They mourned in a great wickerwork of hard muscle and ragged breath. The hot smell of their coats, their black lips pulled back over ivory teeth, stiff sprays of white whiskers; their heavy hair plaited with silver and faience. Their thick hides shivered, as cattle will shiver away flies.I sweated and tried not to clear my throat.”

“You do not feel like dancing and there are no daffodils,only walls, your bedroom door, and the quiet of the house, tucked asleep in the night's thick cover. You wait for dawn. You wait for yourdreams. You wait in the night, and you hunger.”

“I couldn't eat because that book made me cry so hard, I couldn't even breathe. Connie said to keep reading and keep breathing, like that was easy. Tears and snot just about came out my butt, I cried so hard”

“There was no moon at all, and a faint silver peppering of starts fardly showed through the scrim of high clouds. The sea itself seemed to give off light, a spectral, colorless light that was more like the sea's breath. The night was soft and thick and black and warm as velvet, silky on my skin, smelling of iodine and salt and crepe myrtle and that ineffable, skin-prickling saline emanation that says 'ocean' to me whenever I smell it, hundreds of miles inland. It always moves me close to tears, so visceral, so old and tidal is its pull. I have often thought that it is the first smell we know, the amniotic smell of our first, secret sea.”

“We live in a vale of tears...We can have all the dreams we like, but life is hard, implacable, sad.”