“There was the biography of a Norwegian resistance fighter who swam through chilly oceans and got gangrene and wandered through I think it might have been Finland or Lapland in a sweet short summer and everyone took him in and the dark Finnish women made him tea with honey in it on late afternoons and it was beautiful but also horribly sad because the book was only half over and you knew that bad things were going to happen.”

“[Honey is sweet] and so is knowledge, but knowledge is like the bee that made that sweet honey, you have to chase it through the pages of a book.”

“The gaja might despise the Romany, but no Rom ever forgot his dead. For him, roaming over the earth were not only the half million Gypsies who drew breath but also the countless Gypsies who had gone before, restless spirits still wandering through cities and deserts, still real.”

“I wandered through the streets thinking of all the things I might have said and might have done had I been other than I was.”

“The three women laughing over there? Dark wavy hair, coffee skin, and beautiful matching sets of big, lovely—” I slapped him on the arm. “Hey. Eyes. I was going to say eyes. What were you thinking?”

“She knew that what she was going through was nothing special, just garden-variety heartbreak, the sort of thing that poets and novelists had been writing about for hundreds of years, but she also knew, from those same books, that there were people who never recover form it, ones who go on through life beset by a dim and painful longing.”