He walked out of the hospital into the sun, into open air for the first time in months, out of the green-lit rooms that lay like glass in his mind. He stood there breathing everything in, the hurry of everyone. First, he thought, I need shoes with rubber on the bottom. I need gelato.

I am someone who has a cold heart. If I am beside a great grief I throw barriers up so the loss cannot go too deep or too far. There is a wall instantly in place, and it will not fall.

In the desert you celebrate nothing but water.

What night gave Rafael was a formlessness in which everything had a purpose. As if darkness had a hidden musical language.

So we came to understand that small and important thing, that our lives could be large with interesting strangers who would pass us without any personal involvement.

What he would say, he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He cannot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with ease in the real world. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world.

Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.