Children are the closest we have to wisdom and they become adults the moment that final drop of everything mysterious is strained from them.

It's tempting to imagine how we could hurt someone close, because it reminds us how fiercely we love them.

I think living with the absence of someone we love is like living in front of a mountain from which a person - a speck in the distance, on some distance ridge - is perpetually waving.

I think we keep these moments of rejection and acceptance very close. I think we carry them always, like cracked shells from which a part of us once hatched.

Sometimes, language is the sound of longing

When Bach died some of his children sold his scores to the butcher they had decided the paper was more useful for wrapping meat. In a small village in Germany a father brought home a limp goose wrapped in paper that was covered with strange and beautiful symbols.

I tried to convey to the boy how people's lives are often altered by curved lines read slowly from paper, sand, or stone.