“Jealousy clings to love's underside like bats to a bridge.”

“In architecture, space was a material to be shaped, even created. For these men, the material was silence. Silence like water in which you could drown, the absence of talk as constricting as the absence of air.”

“Stumble on joy"--the phrase had knocked something loose in him. Joy: What did it feel like? Trying to remember, he was overcome by longing. He knew satisfaction, the exhilaration of success, contentment, and happiness to the extent he could identify it. But joy?”

“Jacob wore a tetchy air of mild resentment that Paul couldn't begin to understand. He was forty and his father was bankrolling him; what could he possibly feel aggrieved about? He pushed unrealized potential before him like a baby carriage.”

“Sorrow can be a bully.”

“There were in life rarely, if ever, "right" decisions, never perfect ones, only the best to be made under the circumstances.”

“Nothing in life gets dropped without someone else having to pick it up.”