“he sometimes felt himself to be a painfully prosaic person, but by the same token he knew he was incurably sane.”

“He left her. She was dissatisfied with him. He had preferred to incur her anger rather than cause her pain. He had kept all the pain for himself.”

“and then he wanted to say he was sorry, but just that sometimes he felt understandable and sometimes he worried when they bickered and she went a while without saying she loved him, but he restrained himself.”

“But once in a great while he remembered that he had felt pain, a terrible ache in his heart, and he swore he would never let himself feel love for a human again.”

“I could see that the almost mystical aura of this legendary surgeon -- the single-mindedness, the dedication, the skill -- was mere surface. The surgical persona was something he had crafter to protect himself. But what he had created was a prison. Anytime he strayed from the professional to the personal, he knew what to expect: pain.”

“When the guy kissed her, Cassidy felt a stab of pain that was close to physical, and therefore within the penumbra of hurts he told himself he could bear.”