“people themselves are full of tunnels: winding, dark spaces and caverns; impossible to know all the places inside of them. Impossible even to imagine.”

“The tunnels may be long, and twisted, and dark; but you are supposed to go through them.”

“Everything freezes. The blood stops flowing in my veins. My breath stops coming. For a second even the music falls aways and all I hear is something steady and quiet and pretty, like the distant beat of a drum, and I think, i'm hearing my heart, except I know that's impossible, because my heart has stopped too.”

“There's a place for everything and everyone, you know. That is the mistake they make above. They think that only certain people have a place. Only certain kinds of people belong. The rest is waste. But even waste must have a place. Otherwise it will clog and clot, and rot and fester.”

“I don't understand how everything changes, how the layers of your life get buried. Impossible. At some point, at some time, we must all explode.”

“We can never understand. We can only try, fumbling our way through the tunneled places, reaching for light.”

“All at once the hard, cold earth seemed to explode. The brown surface of the world dissolved and in its place was an impossible, an inconceivable, an unbelievable profusion of color: green grass and purple and red flowers; sprays of lily; white baby's breath that covered the hills; nodding fields of bright yellow daffodils; rich purple moss. The trees burst forth with new leaves. The weeping willow tree was a mass of tiny pale green leaves, thousands of them, which whispered and sighed together as the wind moved through its branches. There were fat heads of lettuce in the fields, and cucumbers lying like jewels among them, and enormous red tomatoes surrounded by thick, knotted vines.And for the first time in 1,728 days, the clouds broke apart and there was dazzling blue sky, and light beyond what anyone could remember.The sun had come out at last.”