But his face had that hollow look, as if there was something gone... you know that look. The inward focus. Distantly attentive to the home you're missing, or the someone you're missing. That look that a bird has when it turns it dry reptilian eye on you. That look that doesn't see you because the mind is filled up with someone it would rather see.

If one could drown in the grass, thought Elphie, that might be the best way to die.

When the dawn light is coursing through the slats in the shutters at last, making thin stripes on the floor, she, tossing, decides that for every human soul there must surely be a possible childhood worth living, but once it slips by, there isn’t any reclaiming it or revising it.

Maybe the definition of home is the place where you are never forgiven. So you may always belong there, bound by guilt. And maybe the cost of belonging is worth it.

I actually prefer female voices to listen to, mostly, but among the male singers whose voices I like are Jeff Buckley, Art Garfunkel, that sort of voice. Contemporary crooners rather than rockers.

Before catechisms can instill a proper humility, small children know the truth that their own existence has caused the world to bloom into being.

I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that's almost the same thing.