“his heart laced with regret.”

“His heart was a catapult in his chest.”

“He could not look at his daughter without feeling his heart turn over.”

“Toward midnight he sat in the Raney Playground swings with his broken, disloyal heart continuing to pump behind his ribs. Maybe fifty feet away his daughter was in her bed, reeling, thinking it out, a thousand betrayals and loves and resentments riding the synapses between brain and heart and back again.”

“- even in the midst of grief the mind grapples with a hundred impressions: a pain below the heart, an odor on the breeze.”

“But have heart. Hope is something that can be very dangerous but without it life would be horribly dry. Impossible, even. Take it from me.”

“To be in love was to be dazed twenty times a morning: by the latticework of frost on his windshield; by a feather loosed from his pillow; by a soft, pink rim of light over the hills.”