“had felt time settle over itself, imbricate and fix into place the vertigo of future aligning with the present.”

“silent desperation of everything they never said - gaps and absences in every conversation, the past circumscribing the present, the future hemming in the past.”

“In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.”

“Over time his images of the baby, like photographs handled too often, had worn down and creased, lost their definition. ”

“To consider water on any scale was to confront a boundless repetition of small events. There were the tiny wonders: rain drops, snow crystals, grains of frost aligned on a blade of grass; and there were the wonders so immense it seemed impossible to get his mind around them: global wind, oceanic currents, storms that broke like waves over whole mountain ranges. p 46”

“The dead are gone and so their power over the living is only temporary. You lose sleep, you lose appetite, but eventually you fall asleep and eventually you eat - you may hate yourself for it, but the body's demands are incontrovertible. He had always felt guilt about that, that he went on living... p 115”

“In the infinite permutations of an ice crystal, everything repeats itself, but, really, from another point of view, nothing repeats itself. The arms go out, forming dendrites, sectored plates, the same angle every time, but the final product – because of wind, because of molecular vibration, because of rate of growth and temperature – is never the same.”