“When it comes to life, we spin our own yarn, and where we end up is really, in fact, where we always intended to be.”

“Here we are - despite the delays, the confusion, and the shadows en route - at last, or for the moment, where we always intended to be.”

“When most of us talk to our dogs, we tend to forget that they're not people.”

“There you are, diligently swimming a straight line, minding the form of your strokes, when you look up and see, always a shock, the currents you can't even feel have pulled you off course.”

“Thanks to Granna, Werner and Walter had grown up to be highly functioning, productive citizens -- but if you were to ask Walter, Werner had a far easier time of it and lived his life with the sanctified nonchalance of those who will do anything to avoid dissecting their souls.”

“I come from a culture of handwringers, vengeance seekers, people who name children after ancestors by rote -- first child, paternal grandfather, second child, maternal, and on and on and on.”

“Time plays like an accordion in the way it can stretch out and compress itself in a thousand melodic ways. Months on end may pass blindingly in a quick series of chords, open-shut, together-apart; and then a single melancholy week may seem like a year's pining, one long unfolding note.”