She had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. Whereas I thought words bent emotions like sticks in water.

Yes, Madox was a man who died because of nations.

Death means you are in the third person.

How did you hate me? she whispered. You killed almost everything in me.

I shall have to learn how to miss you.

Half my days I cannot bear not to touch you. The rest of the time I feel it doesn't matter if I ever see you again. It isn't the morality, it is how much you can bear.

A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.

He has been disassembled by her. And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?

Sunlight pours into his Cairo room. His hand flabby over the Herodotus journal, all the tension in the rest of his body, so he writes words down wrong, the pen sprawling as if without spine. He can hardly write down the word sunlight. The words in love.

From this point on in our lives, she had whispered to him earlier, we will either find or lose our souls.