“He was perfectly capable of looking after himself, although after his marriage he had lost the knack for it. He missed the comfort of all the small things Charlotte did for him,but these were nothing compared to the loneliness. There was no one to talk to, with whom to share his feelings, to laugh, or to simply speak of the day.And he missed the sound of the children's voices, giggling, their running footsteps, their incessant questions and demands for his attention or approval. No one interrupted to say "Look at me, Papa" or "What is this for?" or "What does this mean?" or the favorite "Why?" Peace was not peace anymore, it was simply silence.”

“I saw Dad's eyes widen just a fraction when he heard my voice catch. He glanced at me but quickly turned away. He didn't want me to see his reaction, but I did, and I'll never forget it. In that brief glimpse, I could see what he was thinking behind that fixed stare. There would be no grandkids, there would be no more Creed family bloodline, nothing else to look forward to. From that point on I'd become the last, most devastating disappointment in what he thought his life had added up to--one overwhelming failure.”

“He wanted to leave his mom and her unseeing eyes. He was the invisible boy looking for the place where no one could find him, where he did not have to feel invisible anymore.”

“Monk had a brief vision of what it must be like to be a women on her own, obliged to work at pleasing people because your acceptance, perhaps even your financial survival, depended upon it. There must be hundreds - thousands - of petty accommodations, suppressions of your own beliefs and opinions because they would not be what someone else wished to hear. What a constant humiliation, like a burning blister on the heel which hurt with every step.And on the other hand, what a desperate loneliness for a man if he ever realized he was alway being told not what she really thought or felt but what she believed he wanted to hear. Would he then ever trust anything as real, or of value?”

“It's what surprised him most -- not the overpowering love all the books required that he feel for his child -- just that he simply liked being around him. And even with the diagnoisis, or even since, there's something a little joyous, alongside all the disaster, about living with Hendrick. Some feeling he gets about being in better or closer contact with the things we need, the things we want. I want to run the controls on the dump truck. I want to touch the faucet. I want to open the drawer three hundred times in a row. Because who doesn't want that from time to time? To fall deeper in? Who doesn't do it? Some mornings Jack taps his own spoon a few extra times on the rim of the cereal bowl just for the sheer pleasure of it, and then he'll wonder what the space really is, after all, between tic and illness.”

“To take for granted one's blessings is a damage to the soul, and in time one will lose them, simply from lack of care. One should never tire of nourishing and treasuring all that is lovely.”

“Before he had come to the town he had known about nothing but death: here he had learnt to live, to decide things for himself; he had learnt what it felt like to wash in clean water in the sunshine until he was clean himself, and what it felt like to satisfy his hunger with food that tasted good; he had learnt the sound of laughter that was free from cruelty; he had learnt the meaning of beauty”