“As Luchas looked over, those perfectly matched eyes met Qhuinn’s fucked-up ones, and the connection was there: They had both been through hell, and that lock step was more powerful than the common DNA they shared.”

“Judaism teaches us the sentence, “The Lord is One,” is not exclusive to Adonai, but rather inclusive of everything, everything, everything! Did you get that? Everything is One. This means far more than the teaching we are all connected. That teaching could be speaking biologically, or even atomically. I am talking about more than even the microscopic connection we all share. More than our DNA.”

“I'd recognize this look more and more as I grew older, in places both private and public, for reasons both explicit and unspoken, and once you've been seen through in this way -- once you have been made transparent -- no amount of physical pain matches the weight of invisibility.”

“A G-Rated story? About taking some deformed baby and locking him up? And if it was true, and this poor guy had been locked up in there for decades, and someone threw in a perfectly good woman, what the hell do you think he'd do with her? Play Parcheesi?”

“An ordinary beginning, something that would have been forgotten had it been anyone but her. But as he shook her hand and met those striking emerald eyes, he knew before he'd taken his next breath that she was the one he could spend the rest of his life looking for but never find again. She seemed that good, that perfect, while a summer wind blew through the trees.”

“No one was more surprised than I to realize that my newfound freedom had been purchased by giving up on eternity and settling for hell.”