“In anguish, I asked the prime minister what our intelligence agencies were doing all these months when the arms build-up was going on. And why action had not been taken to apprehend Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the extremist leader. I asked her if any police officer had been taken to task for negligence of duty in allowing terrorists to smuggle arms into the temple [Golden temple, Amritsar] for almost two years. She had obviously no plausible answer. With a distant look in her eyes, she replied feebly that it was the duty of the Punjab government to take care of these aspects.”

“She had wondered, when he’d looked into her eyes and said that he’d had to learn to make do without mirrors in the Wild Hunt, whose eyes he’d been looking into for all those years. Who’d been his mirror.
Now she knew.”

“There was a certain history to this. While heavily pregnant with Amelia, she had asked him if she was radiant or if she just looked like a waddling duck. He told her she’d looked like a radiant duck. This had not been the correct answer.”

“Outside the building, she started to walk west to Lexington to catch the bus. Between Third and Lexington, she reached into her coat pocket for her purse and found the sandwich half. She took it out and started to bring her arm down, to drop the sandwich into the street, but instead she put it back into her pocket. A few years before, it had taken her three days to dispose of the Easter chick she had found dead on the sawdust in the bottom of her wastebasket.”

“The kids were just 8 and 10 years old and seemed to be doing much better than I expected. That first night they both went upstairs to bed, and later I went up to check on them. They were asleep. When I saw Melanie I started crying. She had a picture of her dad with her. She was holding it in her arms.”

“One summer morning at sunrise a long time ago
I met a little girl with a book under her arm.
I asked her why she was out so early and
she answered that there were too many books and
far too little time. And there she was absolutely right.”

“God had answered her prayer, not with the thing she asked for, but rather the thing she wanted most in her heart.”

“My books must be an absolute nightmare to translate. I wouldn't do it. I had a couple of them in Japanese some years ago and my wife met a Japanese woman who said that she had read the books. And she asked her what the translations were like. This woman said they were the worst translation she had ever read in her life. She said she didn't recognise the books when she finally read them in English.”

“As far as I know, he never asked where she had been or why she had left and she never told. I guess some stories do not need telling.”

“She had no need to ask why he had come. She knew as certainly as if he had told her that he was here to be where she was.”