“Half a page --- and the morning is already ancient.”

“Sometimes when she is able to spend the night with him they are wakened by the three minarets of the city beginning their prayers before dawn. He walks with her through the indigo markets that lie between South Cairo and her home. The beautiful songs of faith enter the air like arrows, one minaret answering another, as if passing on a rumor of the two of them as they walk through the cold morning air, the smell of charcoal and hemp already making the air profound. Sinners in a holy city.”

“Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again”

“He wants the minute and secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.”

“This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.”

“This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.”

“Commissioner Harris at the far end stared along the mad pathway. This was his first child and it had already become a murderer.”