“His thoughts skirted Sandy and especially Grace as if they were fatal chasms into which he might tumble.”

“O momentary grace of mortal men,Which we more hunt for than the grace of God!Who builds his hopes in air of your good looks,Lives like a drunken sailor on a mast,Ready, with every nod, to tumble downInto the fatal bowels of the deep.”

“All the words he'd stored up had tumbled into the great chasm beneath them”

“I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication.”

“The society killed Kendra."...Don't mention it to Verl. He might dive into a chasm.”

“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”