“The first shot causes warm rain to fall on Diana's arms from the sky. The second plants a mirrored jewel in the left temporal lobe of her brain…a place she could have named on a quiz but which now seems to be the place where the future is imagined, the place where what would have been is.”

“As a girl she had imagined the Milky Way was the curtain of heaven, a notion she had been sorry to abandon as she had grown up. But she would not abandon a belief in heaven itself, wherever that may be, because she felt that if she gave that up then there would be very little left. Heaven may not turn out to be the place of her imagining, she conceded--the place envisaged in the old Botswana stories, a place inhabited by gentle white cattle, with sweet breath--but it would surely be something not too unlike that, at least in the way it felt; a place where late people would be give all that they had lacked on this earth--a place of love for those who had not been loved, a place where those who had had nothing would find they had everything the human heart could desire.”

“I've been at the place where it seems like the only way left is down.”

“If you don't place yourself where you could fail, you'd never have a place from where you'd succeed.”

“This was the place where someone had led her, only she could not remember who and could not remember when. Just that this was where she was now.”

“You can't choose where you belong, and where you don't. But what if the place you don't belong is the only place you have left?”