“It was funny to hear her voice aloud. Her thoughts and perceptions usually existed so deep inside her, they rarely made it to the surface without a deliberate effort.”

“She wondered again about her inclination to wish for things that made her so deeply unhappy.”

“Love made you admire funny things about a person, like how good she was at remembering to return her library books and at slicing cucumbers very thin. She was a veritable wonder at pulling a splinter out of her foot.”

“She realized all at once the deeper thing that bothered her, the thing that made him not just irritating but intolerable: how he kept loving her blindly when she deserved it so little.”

“When she made her way to the big picture window that framed the dining room table she froze. She stopped breathing. The anger was growing again.It grew up into her throat, where she could taste it, coppery like blood, in the back of her mouth. It grew down into her stomach, where it knotted her intestines. It made her arms stiffen and her shoulders lock. It pushed against her ribs until she felt they would snap like sticks.”

“So far, she’d been her usual lame self: solitary and routine-loving, carefully avoiding any path that might lead to spontaneous human interaction.Lena Kaligaris”

“Knowing where she was in the world, even if he never touched her, gave him a deep satisfaction, and he half despised himself for being satisfied with so little.”