“We’re in the vanguard of a nameless battle, a battle without arms or bloodshed or glory: we’re in the vanguard of waiting.”

“She had lived her early years as though she were waiting for something she might, but never did, become.”

“The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write.”

“The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.”

“I've forgotten the words with which to tell you. I knew them once, but I've forgotten them, and now I'm talking to you without them.”

“I'm still there, watching those possessed children, as far away from the mystery now as I was then. I've never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door.”

“Perhaps someone will have seen mine, the one I’m waiting for, just as I saw him, in a ditch when his hands were making their last appeal and his eyes no longer could see. Someone who will never know what that man was to me; someone whose name I’ll never know.”