Each night, Dzia-Dzia would tell me more about Chopin, describing the preludes or ballades or mazurkas, so that even if I hadn't heard them I could imagine them, especially Dzia-Dzia's favorites, the nocturnes, shimmering like black pools.

"She's playing her way through the waltzes," Dzia-Dzia told me, speaking as usual in his low, raspy voice as if we were having a confidential discussion. "She's young but already knows Chopin's secret--a waltz can tell more about the soul than a hymn."

By my bedtime the kitchen table would be shaking so much that it was impossible to practice penmanship any longer. Across from me, Dzia-Dzia, his hair, eyebrows, and ear tufts wild and white, swayed in his chair, with his eyes squeezed closed and a look of rapture on his face as his fingers pummeled the tabletop. He played the entire width of the table, his body leaning and twisting as his fingers swept the keyboard, left hand pounding at those chords that jangled silverware, while his right raced through runs across tacky oilcloth. His feet pumped the empty bucket. If I watched him, then closed my eyes, it sounded as if two pianos were playing.

- Stuart Dybeck, from "Chopin in Winter" in The Coast of Chicago, pg. 21

"a moon-wound ocean"

(Tanuja Desai Hidier, Born Confused, 204)

The truth--that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest human secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.

(Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, page 57)

"She ran the back of her hand along the first shelf, listening to the shuffle of her fingernails gliding across the spinal cord of each book. It sounded like an instrument, or the notes of running feet."

(Marcus Zusak, The Book Thief, page 135)

"I think that Grace fulfilled you in a way you didn't even know you needed."

(Eli Stone, Season 2, Episode 1)

"He didn't have His Book written to be read by what must elect and choose, but by the heart, not by the wise of the earth because maybe they dont need it or maybe the wise no longer have any heart, but by the doomed and the lowly of the earth who have nothing else to read with but the heart. Because the men who wrote his Book for Him were writing about truth and there is only one truth and it covers all things that touch the heart."

(William Faulkner, "The Bear," Go Down, Moses)

After the dance, we left in Sam's pickup. Patrick was driving this time. As we were approaching the Fort Pitt Tunnel, Sam asked Patrick to pull to the side of the road. I didn't know what was going on. Sam then climbed into the back of the pickup, wearing nothing but her dance dress. She told Patrick to drive, and he got this smile on his face. I guess they had done this before.

Anyway, Patrick started driving really fast, and just before we got to the tunnel, Sam stood up, and the wind turned her dress into ocean waves. When we hit the tunnel, all the sound got scooped up into a vacuum, and it was replaced by a song on the tape player. A beautiful song called "Landslide." When we got out of the tunnel, Sam screamed this really fun scream, and there it was. Downtown. Lights on buildings and everything that makes you wonder. Sam sat down and started laughing. Patrick started laughing. I started laughing.

And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.

(Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"To pray is also to breathe, and possibility is for the self what oxygen is for breathing." (Sickness Unto Death, page 40)

Incubation: A Space for Monsters
by Bhanu Kapil

"My mother, smiling euphorically, smoothed the aluminum foil over the pillow and went to sleep, dreaming of mechanical sheep flying through a sky of tungsten. Copper and tulle" (67).