It's the silence I imagine in the rest of the world, the silence of an endless ocean and uninhabitable island, a silence that can be seen from space.

Someday I'll tell you all of it," I say. "I'd like that," he says. "No," I say. "I promise you won't.

You can try to please everyone and risk accomplishing nothing, or go for your dreams and risk pissing a few people off.

In another time, in another place, I wonder who they might have been.

The world seems so clean if you only looked up.

He kissed back, all the pages spread out around us like riddles waiting to be solved. Let them wait. Let my genes unravel, my hinges come loose. If my fate rests in the hands of a madman, let death come and bring its worse. I'll take the ruined craters of laboratories, the dead trees, this city with ashes in the oxygen, if it means freedom. I'd sooner die here than live a hundred years with wires in my veins.

She has the majesty of hurricanes and explosions.