“Who had he been? A failed father, a runaway husband. A son. A packet of unopened letters. He was dead; he was dead.”

“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?”

“it was as if these memories had been hibernating in him, not dead but merely dormant, weathering out, and now they stumbled out of their thousand dens.”

“The dead are gone and so their power over the living is only temporary. You lose sleep, you lose appetite, but eventually you fall asleep and eventually you eat - you may hate yourself for it, but the body's demands are incontrovertible. He had always felt guilt about that, that he went on living... p 115”

“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.”

“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.”

“Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitrary. Winkler was still on an airplane, hurtling north, but he was also pushing farther back, sinking deeper into the overlaps, to the years before he even had a daughter, before he had even dreamed of the woman who would become his wife.”