The Lord gave, and the Lord took away, her grandmother said to her at the edge of the grave. But that wasn’t right, because the Lord had taken away much more than had been there to start with, and everything her child might have become was now lying there at the bottom of the pit, waiting to be covered up.

Adventure is really always just subjecting yourself to something unfamiliar.

Learning to stop wanting things is probably one of the most difficult lessons of getting old.

Home. When it rains, you can smell the leaves in the forest and the sand. It’s all so small and mild, the landscape surrounding the lake, so manageable. The leaves and the sand are so close, it’s as if you might, if you wanted, pull them on over your head. And the lake always laps at the shore so gently, licking the hand you dip into it like a young dog, and the water is soft and shallow.

To understand what a person means or says, it’s basically necessary to already know what that person means or is saying.

Her body is a city. Her heart is a large shady square, her fingers pedestrians, her hair the light of streetlamps, her knees two rows of buildings. She tries to give people footpaths. She tries to open up her cheeks and her towers. She didn’t know streets hurt so much, not that there were so many streets in her to begin with. She wants to take her body on a stroll, out of her body, but she doesn’t know where the key is.

For a long time the old man and this young man sit there side by side at the desk, watching and listening as these three musicians use the black and white keys to tell stories that have nothing at all to do with keys’ colors.

Have the people living here under untroubled circumstances and at so great a distance from the wars of others been afflicted with a poverty of experience, a sort of emotional anemia? Must living in peace – so fervently wished for throughout human history and yet enjoyed in only a few parts of the world – inevitably result in refusing to share it with those seeking refuge, defending it instead so aggressively that it almost looks like war?

How many times, he wonders, must a person relearn everything he knows, rediscovering it over and over, and how many coverings must be torn away before he’s finally able to truly grasp things, to understand them to the bone? Is a human lifetime long enough? His lifetime, or anyone else’s?

The end of a day on which a life has ended is still far from being the end of days.