“And what mattered most was not that I needed to see and hear that I was beautiful. No, what mattered most was that I was in love with a young woman whose love for me introduced me to the vastness of the universe, the infinite and the finite, from Timbuktu to me, the young Ever Park brother who played basketball and wrote secret letters, and who sometimes just happened to, you know, stumble in and find Kaya in the library after school.”

“The truth was that although my grandma loves us and we loved her, the courage to love someone new, someone she had no hand in creating had been razed from her, torn from its roots, burned and hacked from every follicle, every pore. So she was scared to love. Because she didn't think she could handle it. Because what would she do or become if love was stripped from her once more?”

“That is, I could either see myself as a nonentity, or I could see myself as whatever I wished to be, like a star, born from the bang of nothing or a dream.”

“Our love was unwavering, unflappable, greater than anything presented by the Bible, the Torah, and the Qur'an combined. That is, where we'd go, what would occur, what we lost and gained together, what we suffered and championed through, what we sometimes wished to recall and force ourselves to forget, our lives, the occasions and circumstances, were more than everything, more than forever, more than even the truth.”

“My emotions were arrivals and departures, nonstop insignificances speeding through a station.”

“Yeah god speaks to me sometimes... mostly he mumbles. I'm not sure he knows who I am.”

“The most important people in this man's life - the people who have mattered to him most - aren't my Mother or his wives or me or Anna or Allie. The people who matter most are the people in his head. That is loneliness.”