Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who's been abandoned by family, husband, children and fortune believes in God.

We know story collections end when they end, as well - the pages serving as a countdown - but nevertheless the standard story anthology hews closer to what makes being human so hard: it reminds you with each story how quickly everything we are, everything we call our lives can change, can be upended, can disappear. Never to return.

It's exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, that prayer has dominion.

She smelled like herself, like the wind through a tree.

Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one.

I think that if you're writing about the human condition, my God, you've got to start at base: point zero, point one, is the body.

You can't be a human without seeing.