The Cloud Atlas

There’s no one left,” he said again. “No one for me, no one for you.”

I’m not sure there is a place closer to someone than being at their side, awake, while they’re asleep.

we had, and to some extent, still have, Alaska -places you go to take leave of one life and start another.

magic having failed both of you, at the mercy of gossips and gods and bishops and ravens.

The Yup’ik say the tundra is haunted. But haunted is a white man’s word, and it doesn’t mean what the Yup’ik mean. The spirits found in the bush-animal and human, living and dead-do not haunt, they exist, as real and present as any other aspect of life: water, breath, food.

point had been replaced with a not-quite-identical twin. The sky was a blanket, the water was ink, and there, in the bow of the boat, a woman I once knew was speaking a language I did not.

wartime Alaska had always been a strange place, but we were streaming into something altogether different, a kind of dreamscape, where every reference

And Lily had trained me to believe in what I knew, what I knew because I was certain of it, not because I had evidence.

Replaying these memories, it seems unmistakable now to me how completely mad he was. And I don’t mean madness like the kind that doctors like to cure nowadays with dollops of prettily colored pills. I mean old-fashioned, Edgar Allan Poe-type madness

except it wasn’t called a park then. It was just the place where Anchorage gave up and the rest of Alaska began,