“But it is the unopened letter that he will remember most clearly. It is heavy. The red ink is already smudged. The letter makes him feel as if anything is possible. The future and the past are in his hands. Everything is contained. Time feels as measured as the white flour drifting in the air and he understands, foe a few slow minutes, the pleasure of not knowing.”

“I want to go home. Then he mentally underlined the last sentence three times, rewrote it in huge letters in red ink, and circled it before putting a number of exclamation marks next to it in his mental margin.”

“With Blue here, he was beginning to feel as if possibly he'd overdone it with the helicopter. He wondered if it would make Blue feel better or worse to know that it was Helen's helicopter, that he hadn't paid anything today for the use of it. Probably worse. Remembering his vow to at least do no harm with his words, he kept his mouth shut.”

“Who had he been? A failed father, a runaway husband. A son. A packet of unopened letters. He was dead; he was dead.”

“When a book lies unopened it might contain anything in the world, anything imaginable. It therefore, in that pregnant moment before opening, contains everything. Every possibility, both perfect and putrid. Surely such mysteries are the most enticing things...grant[ed] us in this mortal mere...Unknown and therefore infinite.”

“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.”