“There had been so many easy words between them that Daniel was guilty of nodding every now and then and tuning out the excess. He hadn't known, at the time, that he should have been hoarding these, like bits of sea glass hidden in the pocket of a winter coat to remind him that once it had been summer.”

“I should have liked to have had him beside me in a glass coffin, so that I could watch him all the time and he would not have been able to get away from me.”

“This would have once been a place for contemplation. He looked up at the towers surrounding him. Many of the dead bodies had been removed. Their places had been taken by the living.”

“Once, this whole world had been hidden beneath a shallow sea.”

“For several years Quinn had been having the same conversations with this man, whose name he did not know. Once, when he had been in the luncheonette, they had talked about baseball, and now, each time Quinn came in, they continued to talk about it. In the winter, the talk was of trades, predictions, memories. During the season, it was always the most recent game. They were both Mets fans, and the hopelessness of that passion had created a bond between them.”

“And it was at moments like this that she had to remind herself that she was in love with him, or had once been in love with him, a long time ago.”