“On the day of Christina’s exorcism, the Saracens stormed the Holy Land.”
“ ‘Did you see a little boy?’ she asks every new arrival. ‘A boy who looks like me?’ ”
“Oghi knew that his mother-in-law was worried about him. He also knew that she blamed him. He was the reason that her one and only child was gone.”
“One by one they fell, backward or forward, and he alone was cutting through the air, bent double over his skis, until he saw her.”
Fiction: “Within this small boy, so modest in his manner, there were symphonies unwritten, suites and concertos and oratorios.”
Fiction: “He is nominated for a prize no one believes he will win. Not his agent, who urged him to stay home and start a new book.”
Fiction: “One rainy night, in March, 2009, we crossed a muddy field to intercept a group of Taliban who’d come out of the mountains of Pakistan.”
Fiction: “She was a motel maid, but it helped to think like a doctor or a nurse. It helped to think that she was helping other people.”
Fiction: “The difference between who I was then and who I am now is that now I never assume that anyone I encounter shares my opinion about anything.”
Fiction: “Only once I was inside did I realize that leaving Duvel there alone had been a tremendous mistake.”