“Harvard Square could feel like a party on a warm night, full of energy and privilege and promise. Or it could seem like one of the bleakest places on earth--an icy, windswept rat maze where kids wasted their youth clawing over one another in a fatuous contest for credentials.”

“The heat of late afternoon closed in around us like an animate thing; you could feel it on your skin, warm and moist, like a great beast panting. The air was so dense it seemed to require a huge effort even to inhale it. It lay thick in the lungs and seemed to give no refreshment.”

“I had to remind myself that Islam had once swept north as far as the gates of Vienna; that when the haggadah had been made, the Muslims' vast empire was the bright light of the Dark Ages, the one place where science and poetry still flourished, where Jews, tortured and killed by Christians, could find a measure of peace.”

“I took the T from Logan airport to Harvard Square. I hate driving in Boston. It's the traffic that drives me spare, and the absolutely terrible manners of the motorists. Other New Englanders refer to Massachusetts drivers as "Massholes.”

“How was it that he could remember not remembering, and yet the fugitive facts themselves remained so elusive? How could he misplace the skills of a lifetime? Where did such knowledge go?”

“I recognized the tokens of the time, because I had lived through just such another uneasy season, when every day was tainted by the foul breath of a fear that could not be faced forthrightly, yet could not be ignored.”

“Strip by strip the lash carved into Grace's shuddering flesh. My tears were falling by then, heavy drops, joining in the leaf dust with the blood that had begun to trickle from the table. My limbs were so weak that I could not even raise a hand to wipe the mucus that dripped from my nose.She had been lying with her head faced away from me. She lifted it then, and turned, so that we looked at one another. If an anvil had fallen from the sky at that moment and landed upon me, I could not have felt more crushed.”