“Makes you think different about things, don’t it?”

“Now, that next best of times, is long, and rewrites everything.”

“A tree is a passage between earth and sky.”

“They can’t believe a kid worked for months on an original idea, for no reason at all except the pleasure of looking until you see something.”

“No strangeness stranger than the strangeness of living things.”

“The car is filled with beings of light. They’re everywhere, unbearable beauty, the way they were the night her heart stopped. They pass into and through her body. They don’t scold her for forgetting the message they gave her. They simple infuse her again. Her joy at their return spills over, and she starts to cry. They speak no words out loud. Nothing so crude as that. They aren’t even they. They’re part of her, kin in some way that isn’t yet clear. Emissaries of creation—things she has seen and known in this world, experiences lost, bits of knowledge ignored, family branches lopped off that she must recover and revive. Dying has given her new eyes.”