For their entire lives, even before they met you, your mother and father held their love for you inside their hearts like an acorn holds an oak tree.

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

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.

We tend to associate humor with lightheartedness, but really, it's a rhetorical mode than can be applied to any subject. It was through researching Chechnya that I came to understand this.

Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.

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

Inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce, and that is who we are.