“She felt, as she felt so often with Murphy, spattered with words that went dead as soon as they sounded; each word obliterated, before it had time to make sense, by the word that came next; so that in the end she did not know what had been said. It was like difficult music heard for the first time.”

“She smiled. She knew she was dying. But it did not matter any longer. She had known something which no human words could ever tell and she knew it now. She had been awaiting it and she felt it, as if it had been, as if she had lived it. Life had been, if only because she had known it could be, and she felt it now as a hymn without sound, deep under the little whole that dripped red drops into the snow, deeper than that from which the red drops came. A moment or an eternity- did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist. She smiled, her last smile, to so much that had been possible.”

“She knew words no one had ever heard of, and she used words every day that had been mainly dead or sleeping for hundreds of years.”

“Some music has words, and rock had words that at times aspired to poetry, but the words were always sounds first, spoken to the body before the mind.”

“She watched his lips forming the words, at the same time she heard them under her skin, under her winter coat, so near and full of warmth that she felt herself go hot.”

“I’m not a big drinker and I’ve had enough secondhand smoke for this decade and the next, so . . .”Great. All she had to do was complain about the deafening volume of the music, and she might as well slap a sticker on her forehead saying old next to the one that already said nerd.“Band’s good, though,” she added. “Country’s not my thing, but the players are . . . proficient.” And great, now she sounded like a professor. Proficient. God.But he was nodding. “Country’s not my thing, either.”“But you have a cowboy hat,” she said, and as soon as the words left her lips, she realized how stupid she sounded, no—not that she sounded, but that she was.”