You'll never be just anything. A tsunami can never be just a wave (...) Waves are banal. Tsunamis reshape the Earth

Nobody looks good in their darkest hour. But it's those hours that make us what we are. We stand strong, or we cower. We emerge victorious, tempered by our trails, or fracture by a permanent, damning fault line.

Don't accuse me of being morbid when I'm merely the product of a culture that buries the bones of the ones they love in pretty, manicured flower gardens so they can keep them nearby and go talk to them whenever they feel troubled or depressed. That's morbid. Not to mention bizarre. Dogs bury bones, too.

I was a twenty-two-year-old single white female alone in a strange country where my sister had been killed.

Irony, perfect definition: that for which I want to possess it, I would no longer want once I possessed it.

I felt the electricity of his body behind me as he reached around me and took the card from my hand. He didn't move away, and I battled the urge to lean back into him, seeking the comfort of his strength. Would he wrap his arms around me? Make me feel safe, if only for a moment, and if only a delusion?

The inspector ate only two of my tiny sandwiches: the first because he hadnt expected it to taste so awful; the second, I think, because hed thought surely the first must have been a mistake.