“If I collected dust, I wouldn’t mind if I got dust on it. My collection would grow and accumulate naturally. Probably my love would blend in with it as well, since I haven’t used it in so long.”

“His shelf. Good. Noodle dust. Decaying brain collecting dust. Must insert it back in skull—what was I thinking?”

“Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying, ‘Do you know what a poem is, Esther?’‘No, what?’ I would say.‘A piece of dust.’Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, ‘So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you’re curing. They’re dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.’ And of course Buddy wouldn’t have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep.”

“I am incomplete without my work. I am so closely bound to it, so much identified by it, that without it I think I would crumble into dust and drift away.”

“I loved him and I would love him until every fibre in my body was gone and had turned to dust, but even when my bones had joined the earth, the memory of our love would live on beyond the ages.”

“I love Conrad and I probably always would. I would spend my whole life loving him one way or another. Maybe I would get married, maybe I would have a family, but it wouldn’t matter, because a piece of my heart, the piece where summer lived, would always be Conrad’s”