For the merest moment I couldn't breathe. Something inside me quivered, some oud string plucked by his words, and if I breathed it would stop.He did not know the truth of me, yet he had perceived something true about me that no one else had ever noticed. And in spite of that—or perhaps because of it—he believed me good, believed me worth taking seriously, and his belief, for one vertiginous moment, made me want to be better than I was.

It was astonishing how much meaning could be crammed into a single word. How did such words not crumble under their own weight?

It's too great, too terrible, too much. You can shout words into the void forever and never fill it up.

The words bounced off her like a stone skipping over the surface of a lake.A stone may skip a long way, but it always sinks eventually.