“There was something much greater she needed to feed her soul, and perhaps one day soon she would go…”

“She was already putting her distance between herself and this woman she would kill. She was becoming an object, something she was going to do something unpleasant to; not a person with a right to live.”

“Mariam always held her breath as she watched him go. She held her breath and, in her head, counted seconds. She pretended that for each second that she didn't breathe God would grant her another day with Jalil.”

“One day, she’d find a way to live her life to the fullest. She was sure of it. She just had no idea how she would manage it.”

“She didn't know whether she was running away from something or running to something, but she admitted that deep in her heart she wanted to go home.”

“If everyone ate a Western diet, we would need two Planet Earths to feed them. We only have one. And she is dying.”

“He longed for the deep as she longed for the night sky and for white lilies floating on water -- although she still tried to convince herself that love alone could feed her soul.”

“He loved her so passionately he wanted her to be one soul and one body with him; and he was conscious that here, with those deep roots attaching her to the native life, she would always keep something from him.”

“A girl, if she has any pride, is so ashamed of having anything she wishes to say out of the hearing of her own family, she thinks it must be something so very wrong, that it is ten to one, if she have the opportunity of saying it, that she will not.
And yet she is spending her life, perhaps, in dreaming of accidental means of unrestrained communion.”

“Soon. She knew. Soon he would come visiting. Incarnadine and sweet and sad and broken. Just like her.”