“With luck, it might even snow for us.”

“But why should you be interested in me?"Good question. I can’t explain it myself right this moment. But maybe – just maybe – if we start getting together and talking, after a while something like Francis Lai’s soundtrack music will start playing in the background, and a whole slew of concrete reasons why I’m interested in you will line up out of nowhere. With luck, it might even snow for us.”

“Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.”

“Luck was a joke. Even good luck was just bad luck with its hair combed.”

“The snow crystals . . . come to us not only to reveal the wondrous beauty of the minute in Nature, but to teach us that all earthly beauty is transient and must soon fade way. But though the beauty of the snow is evanescent, like the beauties of the autumn, as of the evening sky, it fades but to come again.”

“Even if you cannot forgive yourself, and by some poor luck you cannot forgive anyone else either, and there is no vengeance to be had in this baneful world that is slowly suffocating on its own past, there might still be a paradox of goodness”