Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing each moment into the bed with her like a child with schoolbooks and pencils. The day seems to have no order until these times, which are like a ledger for her, her body full of stories and situations.

Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.

Between the kitchen and the destroyed chapel a door led into an oval-shaped library. The space inside seemed safe except for a large hole at portrait level in the far wall, caused by mortar-shell attack on the villa two months earlier. The rest of the room had adapted itself to this wound, accepting the habits of weather, evening stars, the sound of birds.

All I ever wanted was a world without maps.

In Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.

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

Half a page--and the morning is already ancient.