"You think maybe if you just work harder and faster, you can hold off the chaos, but then one day you’re changing a patio light bulb with a five-year life span and you realize how you’ll only be changing this light maybe ten more times before you’ll be dead."

"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."

"True sleep eluded me. Morpheus is a capricious god; he comes easily to some and only with greatest difficulty to others. To lure him, it is best to pretend disinterest. Engage the mind in some pursuit unrelated to what is truly desired and allow no distraction from it. For me, nothing works so well as a walk through Rome."

"And in her long nights, in her long house of smoke and miller's stones, she baked the bread we eat in dreams, strangest loaves, her pies full of anguish and days long dead, her fairy-haunted gingerbread, her cakes wet with tears."

"Her friends used to tell her it wasn't rape if the man was your husband. She didn't say anything, but inside she seethed; she wanted to take a knife to their faces."