“Certain things existed out of time. It was ten years ago, it was this morning. In that way the accident was like his mother's death. It did not recede so much as hover, waxing and waning at different intervals but always there. It happened in the past and it was always happening. It happened every single minute of the day.”

“Listen she said, everything ends, every single relationship you will ever have in your lifetime is going to end.... I'll die, you'll die, you'll get tired of each other. You don't always know how it's going to happen, but it is always going to happen. So stop trying to make everything permanent, it doesn't work. I want you to go out there and find some nice man you have no intention of spending the rest of your life with. You can be very, very happy with people you aren't going to marry.”

“That was the way things worked. When you were looking for the big fight, the moment that you thought would knock everything over, nothing much happened at all.”

“...fiction writing is like duck hunting. You go to the right place at the right time with the right dog. You get into the water before dawn, wearing a little protective gear, then you stand behind some reeds and wait for the story to present itself...You choose the place and the day. You pick the gun and the dog. You have the desire to blow the duck apart for reasons that are entirely your own. But you have to be willing to accept not what you wanted to have happen, but what happens... By the time you get out of the marsh, you will have written a novel so devoid of ducks it will shock you.”

“People die, terrible things happen. I know this now. You can't pick up and leave everything behind because there is too much sadness in the world and not enough places to go.”

“There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it.”

“The early years he had spent building Nansei were like a hurricane in his memory, a huge, overbearing wind into which every loose thing was sucked.”