“At the very end of a rutted track that wound from the valley into the foothills lived a man named John Bunting.”

“His kiss was mist off a waterfall.”

“I promised them sweaters.”

“to be clear, I never said I was trying to save the world…”

“They say the Baal Shem Tov visited Slutsk in the year 1733, or perhaps 1734.”

“My favorite trail is bare, and all I see is metaphor.”

“The sisters were forbidden to touch it their first year because they were learning to stay inside the walls.”

“Darkness had fallen on Cuba Street with a certainty that felt unusual and unforgiving to Ruth when she disembarked from her bus at six in the evening.”

“My fear is not that I will be a bad mother—on the contrary, I know I will be caring and kind—but that love for my child will be an affliction, a compulsion that subjugates my own desires.”