“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.”

“Over time his images of the baby, like photographs handled too often, had worn down and creased, lost their definition. ”

“The dread that had been rising all morning rose higher in his throat as if by capillary action.”

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

“Her smile was genuine-looking and later he would mull her question over and over in his head until it mushroomed into something larger.”

“he moved neither forward nor backward in time, but merely endured variations of the same day over and over. Maybe he was the one trapped underwater, under a Plexiglas floor, while the world moved on, men and women checking in and out of rooms, lugging overstuffed suitcases, the soles of their shoes passing lightly above him.”