I looked at her, and she was smiling like she was broken.

The natural world is so adaptable...So adaptable you wonder what's natural.

I feel like it's hard to get into historical novels where you know what the story is far too well.

I've always enjoyed that kind of thing - thinking about the production of narrative and why it is that when we read a novel, we don't notice the fact that someone who might be very close-mouthed or tight-lipped is perfectly willing to tell us a story in 600 or 700 pages.

Whispering makes a narrow place narrower.

At long last, you may no longer distinguish what binds you from what is you.

Perhaps his gloom was due to his profession, that he lived among fallen empires, and in reading these languages that had not been spoken by the common man in centuries, he had all about him the ruin of language, evidence of toppled suburbs, grass growing among the mosaics, and voices that had been choked with poison, iron, age, or ash.