"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up."

"The end. But I'm telling you now, if either of you breathe a word -one goddamn word- about Cate, I will come down on you so hard, they'll be naming hurricanes after me for a fucking century."

"She was alone and destitute in a world of pointless carnage. By an eight-hundred-year-old Sepahrdic tradition she ad been since the age of twelve and a half 'bogeret l'reshut nafsha'--an adult wit authority over her own soul. The Torah taught, Choose life. And so, rather than die of pride, Sofia Mendes sold what she had to sell, and she survived."

"If you aren’t ready, you spend your whole life perseverating on that one situation, getting it wrong time and again. I like to think I am a woman who learns her lesson, but the trick is that you can only ever understand your life backwards, but you live it forward."

"She dove, plunging fully beneath the surface and came up again in tears. Rivulets ran from her face, and the sun ignited them each, transforming them, even amid her sorrow, into gilded runnels set with a diamond shine."