“Evie ” came his faint whisper “I’m going to your mother see…she’s got ’em to leave a back door open…so I can steal into ’eaven.”

“So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!”

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”

“I've got a blister from touching everything I see
The abyss opens up
It steals everything from me”

“There’s something
so great about this,” she whispers.
About what?” I whisper back.

About this,” she whispers.
About being outlaws.
It’s just you and me—against the world.”

“I don’t see a way in,” Eve whispered.
Why are you whispering?” Myrnin whispered back. “Vampires can hear us, anyway.”

“I can see time," whispered Mogget, so softly that his words were lost.”

“She was leaving the world as woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last. No. It was not so bad, Mariam thought, that she should die this way. Not so bad.”

“A whole bunch of people towards the back of the room were now getting up to leave. But these teachers were not going to intimidate me. I wasn’t my father’s and mother’s son for nada-nothing. I wasn’t my two indigenous grandmothers’ grandson for nada-nothing either. I came from a long line of people…who’d lived through starvation, revolutions, and massacre. “AND YOU!” I yelled into the microphone. “Over there in the back…who are getting up to leave…I’M GLAD THAT YOU’RE LEAVING!”

“Her curiosity was too much for her. She felt almost as if she could hear the books whispering on the other side of the half-open door. They were promising her a thousand unknown stories, a thousand doors into worlds she had never seen before.”