The challenges in this place are real and sometimes very difficult, but I've learned to slow down and look for beauty in my days, for the mysteries and blessings woven into everything, into the very words we speak.

A moment was not a single moment at all, but rather an infinite number of different moments, depending on who was seeing things and how.

It seemed there was no end at all to the lies a person could tell, once she got started.

The thing is, I used to like that: feeling special because I knew something no one else did. It's a kind of power, isn't it, knowing a secret? But lately I don't like it so much, knowing this. It's not really mine to know, is it?

He could hardly imagine anymore what his life would be without the weight of his hidden knowledge. He'd come to think of it as a kind of penance. It was self-destructive, he could see that, but that was the way things were. People smoked, they jumped out of airplanes, they drank too much and got into their cars and drove without seat belts.

He had never even glimpsed her.

She had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love-- nothing, now, but bones.