Caroline Bleeke

“Souraya thought those days that she knew so many songs about the misery of love because pain kept love within the boundaries of time, and knowable, whereas what she was experiencing passed beyond the horizon of birth and death; it was like the eternal life the prophets spoke of. A gesture, a kiss, a task, a sentence had a golden elemental endlessness, like the scenes in the murals painted in the island houses.”
― Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven

“Is she a good baby? People would ask me. Well, no, I'd say.

That swirl of hair on the back of her head. We must have taken a thousand pictures of it.”
― Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation

“In a story, you must always listen for the voice you cannot hear, the one that has been ignored or silenced. In that crushed voice, there is a strain of truth, as a crushed grape yields a drop of wine.”
― Patricia Storace

“We can never stop searching for Heaven, since there is always more of it than we can see. There, as in those tales that evolve endlessly into other tales, stories have no end. They are hardly ever the stories you know, the official ones, in which wishes are made formal, then legislated and enforced as matters of life or death. They are more often the stories we didn’t hear, or wouldn’t believe, told by the person we ignored, the house that was razed, the choir of dry bones. The scholars of Heaven read and study the vast collection of ashes, books from the torched libraries.”
― Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven