“For Winkler each hour was another hour between Cleveland and Anchorage, between who they were becoming and who they had been.”

“Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitrary. Winkler was still on an airplane, hurtling north, but he was also pushing farther back, sinking deeper into the overlaps, to the years before he even had a daughter, before he had even dreamed of the woman who would become his wife.”

“These were the beginnings of a new existence; Winkler could feel it gestating.”

“All the events of his life were compressing to singularity: one night, one hour.”

“An hour passed and another and then, like a glass of water overfilled - the meniscus inverting, going convex, gravity pulling at the edges, the overflow finally giving way - he could not longer suffer his own cowardice. ”

“He could see tiny particles of dust drifting in the air between her ankles, each fleck tumbling individually in and out of the sunlight, and there was something intensely familiar in their arrangement.”

“How few days are left in the lives of anyone. How few hours.”