Once a month I wake in the night, slippery with terror. I'm afraid, not because there's someone in the room, in the dark, in the bed, but because there isn't. I'm afraid of the emptiness, which lies beside me like a corpse.

You meet the same people on the way down that you meet on the way up, but you're going the other way.

You say, The sensed absence of God and the sensed presence amount to much the same thing, only in reverse.

Well. Then we had the irises, rising beautiful and cool on their tall stalks, like blown glass, like pastel water momentarily frozen in a splash, light blue, light mauve, and the darker ones, velvet and purple, black cat's ears in the sun, indigo shadow, and the bleeding hearts, so female in shape it was a surprise they'd not long since been rooted out. There is something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.

The facts of this world seen clearly are seen through tears.

Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.

Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.