“Just about everyone I know has been doing little more than just splitting the difference between life and death.”

“For indeed, if pressed, she might say that the forsythia blooming sweetly on the banks of the creek each spring was her only homeland. She might say that a landscape could take up lodging in the soul.”

“I have to be more eyes than hands. More words than weapons. The best versions of me glower and sway.”

“Every decision you made created a new path. No matter how big or small. There are millions of versions of me extending into the cosmos.”

“His was a thwarted wanderlust. This man knew the terrain, and it was personal.”

“You looked away, but maybe she saw you, because then came her message, Free tonight?”

“She remembers the beginnings and endings of these encounters, but the middle parts are somehow all part of a greater whole.”

“In our time underneath, the sun had sunk behind the island. Even when it disappears, California’s light is best.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to explain. But it’s impossible. Like if I wanted to explain how the ocean works? I could talk all night and you wouldn’t understand,” she said. “No offense.”

“The sun was red when he closed his eyes. He told himself they would travel towards the sun.”

“I stopped at the edge of the road where the pavement met a wall of green.”

“It was bliss. It was blistering—slacking through the heavens at breakneck speeds with January Sutcliffe—and I was new to all of it.”

“I stepped to my right, attempting to hide the wilted plant on the reception desk, which appeared to be on its last moment of photosynthesis. I could relate.”

“What else could still exist here but ourselves? the seamstress sometimes wondered, as her mind wandered slumped in her bed at the dead end of another day.”

“It’s said that the ground is solid. You could call it a safe bet.”

“Is there another world as beautiful and dangerous as this one?”