Myla Goldberg

“The two bond over their mutual lack of family ties: Saul from his disownment, Miriam from the car accident that orphaned her as a college junior. Both want children. Miriam has inherited her parents' idea of procreative legitimacy, wants to compensate for her only-child-dom. She sees in Saul the househusband who will enable her parental ambitions without disabling her autonomy. In Miriam, Saul sees the means to a book-lined study and a lifestyle conducive to mystical advancement. They are both absolutely certain these things equal love.”

“Equity, they came to realize, was not the same thing as equivalence, as evidenced by beside tables and snowflakes the world over.”

“While she eventually adjusts to the faded motivational posters featuring long-dead baby animals and the fifties-era reading books whose soporific effects have intensified with each decade of use she can't get it out of of her head that while she is speeding around in circles waiting to be told when to stop other kids are flying to the moon.”

“She has often felt that her outsides were too dull for her insides, that deep within her there was something better than what everyone else could see.”

“Miriam will never know what kind of dog attacked her, will imagine a Doberman or a German shepherd with snarling, angry teeth despite the fact she bears neither bite marks nor broken skin. It will never cross her mind that the dog was a beagle and that she was knocked over from a surprise more than force. The children of the house she fled will use the incident to convince their parents to keep the dog, which had been on the verge of being given away for its propensity to shit at the slightest hint of thunder it having been sequestered in the garage that night because of a stormy forecast. The family will never know what manner of burglar their fog deflected, will imagine a scruffy, heavy-set man with scars and a limp groping the family jewelery. It will never cross their minds that their intruder was am upper middle-class wife and mother of two who would have had eyes only for their Chinese teakettle. ”

“The day's dashed hopes had temporarily reduced her to the childish presumption that someone she loved should, in return for that love, be able to read her mind.”

“At this time on a weekday morning, the library was refuge to the retired, the unemployed, and the unemployable. ... 'I'm not always this gabby,' the librarian said. 'It's just so nice to talk to someone who isn't constructing a conspiracy theory or watching videos of home accidents on YouTube.”

“What struck Celia most about young children was the intensity of their passions, life too new to be modulated, perspective a possession not yet acquired.”

“Having already funneled its students to their respective classrooms, the school's front hall was empty, its glass showcase in the same neglected spot outside the front office. ... She looked at it briefly, her eyes sweeping over the faces of students whose adult trajectories would lead them either to gloss over these moments or to spend their lives pining for their return.”

“They WERE walking alongside the road, they WERE hit by a car, and now they ARE dead. It doesn't work. Are is present tense. Dead is -- well, dead is past, isn't it? Present tense modifying past; being modifying non-being. Language, in this instance" -- and here Miriam makes a garbled noise in her throat-- "fails.”

“Rushing toward her are all the letters of the alphabet. Each one moves in its own way, X cartwheeling over and over, C hopping forward, M and N marching stiff-legged and resolute.”

“Creation takes place through words, a series of 'And God Saids' bringing each new stage of life into being. Language is God's divine power made manifest in the world.”

“As much as I admire and value intellectualism and experimentation, I've discovered that unless a book has a throbbing heart as well as a sexy brain, I feel like the story is a specimen in a sealed glass jar and not a living, breathing creature I want to take by the hand and talk to for hours on end.”

“Miriam realizes she is a broken vessel, pieces of her scattered everywhere. She has been finding those pieces, in their many forms, and bringing them together so she can be whole again.”