“Music took her somewhere, and I used to wonder where. I thought it was dumb, the way she lived for a collection of sounds, for someone else's words and notes.”

“I hated talking, and I hated listening to everyone else stumble on their words and try to phrase things in the vaguest possible way so they wouldn’t sound dumb.”

“At night the sky was very near, sprawled in star smoke and gamma cataclysms, but she didn't see it the way she used to, as soul extension, dumb guttural wonder, a thing that lived outside language in the oldest part of her.”

“She probably thought I was making a dumb joke, but sometimes history sounded like a dumb joke. History was either a dumb joke or a cruel joke.”

“She didn't belong anywhere and she never really belonged to anyone. And everyone else belonged somewhere and to someone. People thought she was too wonderful. But she only wanted to belong to someone. People always thought she was too wonderful to belong to them or that something too wonderful would hurt too much to lose. And that's why she liked him-- because he just thought she was crazy.”

“She had thought she was going to save her mother, and now there was going to be nothing for her to do but sit by her mother's bedside, hold her limp hand, and home someone else, somewhere else, would be able to do what she couldn't.”