“It was long past midnight. Laura's music played on. It was composed in the language of stars, tinkling in a crystal pool suspended from constellations. She used chimes now and then, the chimes that characterized every patio in Arizona, the piano, the trees combed by wind. A prelude to a storm. It was like discovering the secret room in a dream of your house that holds all the magic. It was music I wished I lived inside. Around us, cactus, hills filled with jumping cholla, the heat of August like another animal heaving over us.”

“You know the most common phrase in the movies is 'let's get out of here?”

“Look at the lonely fisherman,' my father says.'Look at his view,' my mother says.”

“I understood it in my bones. Longing made the music bigger.”

“With the years, we become even more ourselves and call this change.”

“We remained talking, fighting gently or viciously for what seemed like hours, but it was only minutes or perhaps a second, because it was only a dream.”

“Through my sudden tears, the train lights smeared like shooting stars. Lying before the rippling blue window, below the slurred lights of the world above, it was as if we were underwater.”

“Like hunting for a dead beloved's face among the living, in places, we find the place we loved before.”

“We both knew no bounds to our escapism.”

“I lit a cigarette. 'Go ahead, take a smoke,' my father said. 'It won't kill you. Only sadness will.”

“One day you look in the mirror and you see your parents' sadness in your eyes.”