She was fluent in four languages and yet her fists against the rusted hood were the fullest articulation of her defeat.

There was a time when she had indulged in the hypothetical for hours a day, plotting the map that had led her here. But no life is a line, and hers was an uneven orbit around a dark star, a moth circling a dead bulb, searching for the light it once held.

Work isn't meaningful just because you spend your life doing it.

But there had to be a quota. An upper limit to the number of miracles one is privileged to in a lifetime. How many times can a beloved reappear?

He was losing her incrementally. It might be a few stray hairs listless on the pillow, or the crescents of bitten fingernails tossed behind the headboard, or a dark shape dissolving in soap. As a net is no more than holes tied together, they were bonded by what was no longer there." (ARC p. 63)

She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.

Sleep just a while longer, that's it, where else can you go where you neither suffer nor cause suffering.