"I sing to use the waiting, My bonnet but to tie, And shut the door unto my house; No more to do have I, Till, his best step approaching, We journey to the day, And tell each other how we sang To keep the dark away."

"Do you think the memory of someone should dictate how we live going forward?' he asks, threading and unthreading his fingers together.'It depends,' I say. 'I think you can probably honor someone's memory, but you can't live for them, because that means living in the past."

"War is only one facet of the larger problem of evil which has been with the human race since the beginning . . .This same evil tried to destroy the greatest human being who ever lived, nailing Him to a cross."

"I graduated from public high school. I went to the prom. I did it all. But I also worked on 30-million dollar movies with roller coasters and Michelle Pfeiffer. It's been a very interesting and blessed life for sure."

"In the last photograph of her, the bullet wound looked like a cheerful summer rose arranged just above her left ear. A few petals had fallen on her kaffan, the white shroud she was wrapped in before she was laid to rest."

"It was only later, replaying the scene in her mind again and again, that she began to believe it was the expression of a man who was methodically unplugging himself from reality, one cord at a time. The face of a man who was heading out of the blue and into the black."

"Will stared down at his hands. 'My whole life wrecked, destroyed...' 'You're seventeen,' Magnus said. 'You can't have wrecked a life you've barely lived."