“He envisaged her in the heaven he had learned about in childhood: a grassy place with blue sky and a light breeze. He could no longer picture the inhabitants with anything as ridiculous as wings. Instead he saw Nancy strolling in a simple sheath dress, her low shoes held in her hand and a shady tree beckoning her in the distance. The rest of the time, he could not hold on to this vision and she was only gone, like Bertie, and he was left to struggle on alone in the awful empty space of unbelief.”

“She looked at him and he read in her eyes a disappointment that he should have stooped to the dead relative excuse. Yet he was as entitled as the next man to use it. People did it all the time; it was understood that there was a defined window of availability beginning a decent few days after a funeral and continuing for no more than a couple of months. Of course, some people took dreadful advantage and a year later were still hauling around their dead relatives on their backs, showing them off to explain late tax payments and missed dentist appointments: something he would never do.”

“He opened his mouth to say that she looked extremely beautiful and deserved armfuls of roses, but the words were lost in committee somewhere, shuffled aside by the parts of his head that worked full-time at avoiding ridicule.”

“Such an awful fragility of love he thought that plans are made and broken and remade in these gaps between rational behavior.”

“Ah yes, the dreaded one-way system. . . He and Nancy had laughed later, imagining Dante redesigning Purgatory into a one-way system offering occasional glimpses of St. Peter and the pearly gates over two separate sets of dividing concrete barriers.”

“Oh, you're American,' said Mrs. Khan, holding out her hand. 'What a charming costume.''The Bengal Lancers were apparently a famous Anglo-Indian regiment,' said the young man. He pulled at his thighs to display the full ballooning of the white jodhpurs. 'Though how the Brits conquered the empire wearing clown pants is beyond me.''From the nation that conquered the West wearing leather chaps and hats made of dead squirrel,' said the Major.”

“It surprised him that his grief was sharper than in the past few days. He had forgotten that grief does not decline in a straight line or along a slow curve like a graph in a child's math book. Instead, it was almost as if his body contained a big pile of garden rubbish full both of heavy lumps of dirt and of sharp thorny brush that would stab him when he least expected it.”