“eskimos maybe? believed stars were holes in the sky where people who died could peek through at you”

“This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven.”

“To get through the night, I sometimes imagined the sky filled with a canopy of stars. I imagined that each star contained the soul of a girl or boy who had died too young, and the light the stars gave off was their brightness.”

“But who could bear to know which stars were already dead, she thought, blinking up at the night sky; could anybody stand to know that they all were?”

“All through the night, men looked at the sky and were saddened by the stars.”

“Even in the darkness of the closed box she felt trapped inside, she could see light shining in through tiny holes on the lid.They were like the stars beckoning her towards a place where all would be simple . . . away from the shadows, away from the darkness.”