“He was rather clumsy and shy and looked as if he'd spent the last ten years of his life locked up in a library - hardly the kind of man any girl your age dreams of ...”

“...he followed you into the staff room and didn't come back for twenty minutes and when he did come back, he looked like he'd been mauled by a woman who'd been locked in an empty room without a vibrator, or a man for ten years"!”

“Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He'd said he'd spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important years of his life.”

“Now he knew that any memories he might cherish during the last years of his life would be only fictions from a biography he'd never lived.”

“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.”

“But never in his saddest dreams had he thought he'd spend his last years dusting this enormous old house for no one at all.”