“To a certain extent, time was malleable, what he did did matter. Grace was proof of that. Naaliyah was alive.”

“Behind her leg a shy little girl - Grace - smiling up. "Dad?" It was a kind hope. But his dreams spoke to none of that: when he slept he dreamt of darkness, or of people he did not recognize, or of water closing slowly, almost gratefully, over his head.”

“Thirty-one years old, and already Naaliyah was more comfortable with insects than people: they were more chemically predictable, more elegantly designed.”

“Did dreams, he wondered, when they arrived, make a sound? The smallest kind, like the noise of an embryo being conceived, or a snowflake touching down?”

“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.”

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

“the dreams had ceased coming, as they often did, retreating somewhere else for years, until another event of sufficient significance neared, and the patterns of circumstance dragged them to the surface again.”