It had to be the hardest thing, even if he’d never known it himself – to accept that the ones you loved would find their own way home.

To be seen but not known was perhaps the loneliest feeling of all. He had to live for that loneliness, he decided – for the private life of his mind, for the possibility of flight.

How would it feel to know there were people who’d chosen to live as they felt, not as they appeared, and never looked back? Could she bear their happiness, as shunned as they were? Was she brave enough? Was.

We assume that our sight is reliable, that our deeds are straightforward, that our words have one meaning. But life is uncommon and strange; it is full of intricacies and odd, confounding turns.

She had seen it done. Wherever they glittered in the afterlife – flying among the high rafters of heaven, swimming with her mother in an undersea cave – she hoped the tigers had known it, and roared.

But this dagger – this was her first. Her favorite. The same one that had sliced off the boy’s toe on the beach and sent it rolling through the sand.

I’ve found that here in this city, the lights burn ever brighter, but they cast the darkest shadows I know.

Undergarments flapped wildly on the fire escapes above, soiled with sweat and blood: private stains, flying high over the city like crests on the flags of a ship.

Why, he wondered, did he have to peddle his difference for their amusement, and yet at the same time temper it, suppress it, make it suitably benign?

She had a weird, fleeting thought that she wanted to eat her sister, like a sorceress in a storybook – gobble her down into her belly, keep her safe.