We read so that we can be moved by a new way of looking at things.

She was not used to being cruel, but he had taught her how.

Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.

It's all I ever really wanted, that revelation. The possibility of fixed stars.

The sound of her laughter was sticky as sap, the smell of night-blooming jasmine soft as a milk bath.

That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific-chair, eye, stone- but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn't include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out.

A fish has no concept of water.