“I was studying the sky like I was an astronomer, except it was daytime and I didn't have a telescope, so I was just an idiot.”

“It was lunchtime and I was standing outside by the weird sculpture that was supposed to be an Indian. I was studying the sky like I was an astronomer, except it was daytime and I didn't have a telescope, so I was just an idiot.”

“I don't know what you're talking about. I just like animals," Rafael said. "So does Sky, except he's kind of a hippie soulbonder about it.”

“I didn't understand the war. It was new, and they all said it would be there for a long time, but where it was, exactly, was one of the things I didn't understand. It seemed to be out-of-doors, and that was why we had the blackout curtains, so that we didn't have to look at it at night–or it didn't have to look at us, perhaps. Yet on some nights we sat on the balcony and watched searchlights play across the dark sky, and that had to do with the war, too. So the war was in the sky, somehow.And it was there in the daytime, though I was not sure where. It was why sometimes, during school, whistles blew, and we had to run to the subway station.”

“You are adorable, mademoiselle. I study your feet with the microscope and your soul with the telescope.”

“I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth’s ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar.”