It's a defining difference, curiosity. I've never known a stupid person who was curious, or a curious person who was stupid.

She knew words no one had ever heard of, and she used words every day that had been mainly dead or sleeping for hundreds of years.

She died on a windy gray day in March when the sky was full of darting crows and the world lay prostrate and defeated after winter. Peter Lake was at her side and it ruined him forever. It broke him as he had not ever imagined he could have been broken. He would never again be young, or able to remember what it was like to be young. What he had once taken to be pleasures would appear to him in his defeat as hideous and deserved punishments for reckless vanity.

They gave themselves up to the stars the way swimmers can surrender to the waves, and the stars took them without resistance.

All rivers run full to the sea; those who are apart are brought together; the lost ones are redeemed; the dead come back to life; the perfectly blue days that have begun and ended in golden dimness continue, immobile and accessible; and, when all is perceived in such a way as to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but something that is.

Justice came from a fight amid complexities, and required all the virtues in the world merely to be perceived.

I'm not afraid," Rafi said. "Why not?" "If I die tomorrow it will have been useless to have been afraid today.