“Studying ice crystals as a graduate student, he eventually found the basic design (equilateral, equiangled hexagon) so icily repeated, so unerringly conforming, that he couldn't help but shudder: Beneath the splendor--the filigreed blossoms, the microscopic stars--was a ghastly inevitability; crystals could not escape their embedded blueprints any more than humans could. Everything hewed to a rigidity of pattern, the certainty of death.”

“In the infinite permutation of an ice crystal, everything repeats itself, but, really, from another point of view, nothing repeats itself.”

“Maybe the idea was that he could write so many letters, deliver so many envelopes back to Sandy, eventually he'd have sent all of himself, and could exist more there than he did here.”

“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.”

“the air would get so heavy with moisture he imagined he could feel each bloated molecule as it toppled into his lungs.”

“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”

“He was failing at everything important. A room away his daughter was sitting with her face in her hands and he could not go to her.”