"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for."

"I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is."

"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."

"Zoe stopped one last time in front of the mirror, adjusting her new American dress. She didn’t see the dress, however. She saw what the big Russian did to her. She saw what al-Qaeda did to her. She saw a person shunned by her Persian village. She saw ugliness. Every time she looked in the mirror she saw deficiency."

"I regret...' Tobias tilts his head, and sighs. 'I regret my choice.'What Choice?', and... I felt like maybe I could make something more of my decision.'."

"Summer fell upon Paris, with everyone still intently following his own subterranean course of passion or habit and looking up like a startled creature of the night at the blazing June sun. Now, all of a sudden, there was an impelling necessity to go away, to give a continuation or a meaning to the winter that had just gone by."

"There are many places you need to be, but there is nowhere to reach. There are many people you need to see but no one to meet. And there are many contacts in your phone but no one to talk. There are many masks in your closet but no face to please."

"In the end, age in numbers is no more than an empty bag. The only way to truly tell a person's years is by examing the contents they have filled it with."

"I shuffle along, letting the current pull me, and I have the sense that I am like a rat caught in a maze of tunnels, moving endlessly toward some promise of...Of what? Light? Life? Cheese?"

"Huging my pillow to my chest, I told myself, At least soon you won't have so much time to miss him. Soon school will start again, and then you'll be busier. Wait. Am I reduced to HOPING for school to start? Somehow, I have discovered a whole new level of pathetic."