“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.”

“The year swung past the fulcrum of another equinox.”

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

“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.”

“For lunches he rode the elevator to the fourth-floor food court and ate Thai Town or Subway at a table tucked among potted tropicals, gazing past milling teenagers to the little penny-choked fountain where a copper salmon spat water into a chlorinated pool.”

“Maybe he was dead and this island was purgatory from which he could only watch the souls of the more deserving go shuttling past to their various Edens. What is death, after all, but a cessation of involvement with the world, a departure from those you love, and those who love you?”