“From some infinite distance, ten thousand twists of light are suddenly projected into your eyes. You watch as they shimmer and tighten together like the hooks of metal in a tangle of barbed wire.More and more of them appear, filling in the gaps one by one, and soon you are conscious of nothing else.What would the sky be like if there was nothing to see but stars?You know that you will not experience anything so beautiful again.”

“The street lamps and illuminated signs were all extinguished, and on impulse everybody looked into the sky. The frogs and crickets fell quiet to the count of five before they began to sing again. The smaller stars were spread across the darkness in a fine white powder, and the brighter ones pierced the air like nail points. In Andrew Brady’s yearbook she wrote: The thing I will always remember about you is the time we were watching the film strip in Miss Applebome’s class, and the lights were out, and you sat behind me scratching my back with your fingers.”

“They were like those deep-sea creatures with watery, transparent skin: you could see the soft little jerking beans of their hearts, you understood that the very thing that was supposed to protect them was the thing that made them vulnerable, and you knew you couldn’t help them, so you decided to love them instead.”

“How often, you wonder, has the direction of your life been shaped by such misunderstandings? How many opportunities have you been denied--or, for that matter, awarded--because someone failed to see you properly? How many friends have you lost, how many have you gained, because they glimpsed some element of your personality that shone through for only an instant, and in circumstances you could never reproduce? An illusion of water shimmering at the far bend of a highway.”

“Occasionally, the light seemed to arrive from a distinct direction, like the sun slanting through a gap in a curtain, but often it simply infused whatever aches or traumas afflicted people. At such times, it had the appearance of a strange luminescent paint layered directly over their skin. They might have been angels in an El Greco painting.”

“There are times in your life when, despite the steel weight of your memories and the sadness that seems to lie at your feet like a shadow, you suddenly and strangely feel perfectly okay.”

“A successful song comes to sing itself inside the listener. It is cellular and seismic, a wave coalescing in the mind and in the flesh. There is a message outside and a message inside, and those messages are the same, like the pat and thud of two heartbeats, one within you, one surrounding. The message of the lullaby is that it’s okay to dim the eyes for a time, to lose sight of yourself as you sleep and as you grow: if you drift, it says, you’ll drift ashore: if you fall, you will fall into place.”