“Funny how in a city of 750,000 one could feel so utterly alone and vulnerable - half a million people and no one to protect you. It's partially the nature of the location of Winnipeg. Alone in the Prairies, in the middle of the country, where the wind blows hard and the snow can pile up around your feet while you wait to cross the street.”

“Marcovaldo learned to pile the snow into a compact little wall. If he went on making little walls like that, he could build some street for himself alone; only he would know where these streets led, and everybody else would be lost there. He would remake the city, pile up mountains high as houses, which no one would be able to tell from real houses. But perhaps by now all the houses had turned to snow, inside and out, a whole city of snow and with monuments and spires and trees, a city could be unmade by shovel and remade in a different way.”

“There are no birds in a formation to cut the wind, so when you fly on your own, the struggle is yours alone and you must be stronger than those in a flock. The wind blows hard. Fly.”

“There are a million things in this world that can end you, that can in one second obliterate the life you work so hard to keep alive. Our lives are structured around not dying. Eating, sleeping, looking both ways before you cross the street. It's all, all of it, to keep us safe from the thing that we know is going to get us anyway. It doesn't even make sense, if you think about it. It's the world's biggest joke. Our entire lives are set up around not dying, knowing all the while that it's the one thing we can't avoid.”

“It was so much easier to be alone, if one could find just the right location.”

“She understood how a world jammed with phones, email, and faxes could still leave you feeling utterly alone.”