Many people have a novel inside them, but most don't bother to get it out.

His hand is cool on my cheek as he paints a tear beneath my left eye, dark blue and swollen with sorrow.

remember that every fire will burn itself out, even without your help.

If you want to know someone's story, they have to tell it aloud. But every time, the telling is a little but different. It's new, even to me.

Each memory is like a paper flower stowed up a magician's sleeve: invisible one moment and then so substantial and florid the next I cannot imagine how it stayed hidden all this time. And like those paper flowers, once they've been let loose in the world, the memories are impossible to tuck away again.

Oh,that's right. You're a...what did you call it? Ah, a ghost hunter. You don't have to see things to believe them." Adam's gaze locked onto the persecutor's. "Maybe you've got that backward," he said. "Maybe it's just that I believe things you cant see.

It was always easier for me to show love than to say it. The word reminded me of pralines: small, precious, almost unbearable sweet. I would light up in his presence; I felt like a sun in the constellation of his embrace. But trying to put what I felt for him into words diminished it somehow, like pinning a butterfly under glass, or videotaping a comet.