I can admit, now, that I must have loved Lena. Not in an Unnatural way, but my feelings for her must have been a kind of sickness. How can someone have the power to shatter you to dust--and also to make you feel so whole?

We're killers, all of us: We kill our lives, our past selves, the things that mattered. We bury them under slogans and excuses.

Time becomes a stutter-the space between drumbeats, splintered into fragments, and also endlessly long, as long as soaring guitar notes that melt into one another, as full as the dark mass of bodies around me. I feel like the air downstairs has gone to liquid, to sweat and smell and sound, and I have broken apart in it. I am wave: I am pulled into the everything. I am energy and noise and a heartbeat going boom, boom, boom, echoing the drums.

The tunnels may be long, and twisted, and dark; but you are supposed to go through them.

The sparrows jumped before they knew how to fly, and they learned to fly only because they had jumped.

My former people were not totally wrong. Love is a kind of possession. It’s a poison. And if Alex no longer loves me, I can’t bear to think that he might love somebody else.

He who leaps for the sky may fall, it's true. But he may also fly.