“’Tomorrow they’ll be so far,’ she said. ‘And we’ll just be here, isn’t that weird?’ ― always with a wistfulness that betrayed her envy of passengers traveling through the night at high speed. It was a mystery to Phoebe, her sister’s envy; why, when she and Faith were so clearly the winners, curled in warm beds, with Grandma’s rough starched sheets pulled tight across their chests? Given a choice, who wouldn’t choose home?”

“I was working for the city as a janitor in a neighborhood elementary school and, in summer, collecting litter in the park alongside the East River near the Williamsburg Bridge. I felt no shame whatsoever in these activities, because I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.”