“I was relieved to see some color come backto his face after he ate, though he still had dark circles under his eyes as if he hadn’t slept for a week. I thought I had the monopoly on those.”

“I don't know how it happened. Through the din of the crowd, I heard this tiny scream. As small and distant as it was, it was like thunder in my head.' He looked up at me. Some of the blood had drained from his face making the dark circles under his eyes more pronounced. 'I knew it was you. I don't know how or why, but I knew it was you.”

“Amazingly, he smiled at me. "You're bossy." His pupils were still huge, but a little color had begun to come back into his face, especially along his cheekbones. "I like bossy chicks.”

“His eyes were still closed and his body rocked gently to the music, but his face was almost...desolate. His words matched his face, as he sang about how each day was a struggle, and never seeing my face caused him physical pain. He sang that "my face was his light, and he felt drenched in darkness without it." Tears fell freely after I heard that line.”

“I see a few hands stretching out to me at the edge of the net, so I grabbed the first one I could reach and pull myself across. I roll off, and would have fallen face-first onto a wood floor if he had not caught me. "He" is the young man attached to the hand I grabbed. He has a spare upper lip and a full lower lip. His eyes are so deep-set that his eyelashes touch the skin under his eyebrows, and they are dark blue, a dreaming, sleeping, waiting color.”

“[My grandfather] returned to what he called ‘studying.’ He sat looking down at his lap, his left hand idle on the chair arm, his right scratching his head, his white hair gleaming in the lamplight. I knew that when he was studying he was thinking, but I did not know what about. Now I have aged into knowledge of what he thought about. He thought of his strength and endurance when he was young, his merriment and joy, and how his life’s burdens had then grown upon him. He thought of that arc of country that centered upon Port William as he first had known it in the years just after the Civil War, and as it had changed, and as it had become; and how all that time, which would have seemed almost forever when he was a boy, now seemed hardly anytime at all. He thought of the people he remembered, now dead, and of those who had come and gone before his knowledge, and of those who would come after, and of his own place in that long procession.”