“The afternoon slipped away while we talked -- she talked brightly when any subject came up that interested her -- and it was the last hour of day -- that grave, still hour when the movement of life seems to droop and falter for a few precious minutes -- that brought us the thing I had dreaded silently since my first night in the house.”

“We talked, she and I. She asked about my work and it was a pretense, she was not interested in my work. And when I answered, it was a pretense. I was not interested in my work either. There was only one thing that interested us, and she knew it. She had made it plain by her coming.”

“Robert and I decided last night that we are going to fight this thing with every ounce of strength that we have, she declared. We will not give in to it as long as the Lord gives us breath. We will fight it minute by minute and hour by hour, Meteor. But we will never give up. Our love and faith will get us through this dark time.”

“She had had insomnia badly when she was fresh from Home.... She had had only occasional bad nights since then. Bad? she thought. Why bad? I rarely feel much the worse the next day, except for a sort of moral irritability that seems to go with the feeling that I ought to have spent all those silent hours asleep.”

“Nights when I need to sleep and you can't. Days when I want to talk and you won't. Hours when every noise you make interferes with my silence. Weeks when there is a buzzing in the air, and we both pretend we don't hear it.”

“Yukiko steered the subject away from sex as fast as she could. She was still occasionally woken by nightmares about the day her father had tried to sit her down for "the talk".”