“A fear Paul had transformed all these years, like a gifted alchemist, into anger and rebellion.”

“The year was 1922, and the Curies had transformed plain earth into something rare and unimagined. A secret of the universe has been revealed, and a restless world dreamed of transformation. [p. 205]”

“This is what he knew that Paul didn't: the world was precarious and sometimes cruel. He'd had to fight hard to achieve what Paul simply took for granted.”

“For this is what I have learned, in my short life: do not act out of anger. Act from love or not at all. I have seen it, how anger makes a space for what I must call evil.”

“Paul, careening down the slide with his arms out flung, and Phoebe, present somehow through her absence.”

“After all these years, I feel so free. Who knows where I might fly?”

“Around me the beautiful windows, connecting me to other lives and other times, to things done and also deliberately left undone, stood dark. Rose, I was sure, had acted out of love, yet for Iris her mother's absence had remained an unresolved sadness at the center of her life. I thought of what Rose had written about anger, about its power to corrupt, to make a space for evil. Maybe she was right. Maybe evil, that old-fashioned word, could be called other things, disharmony or dysfunction. Maybe Rose was right and evil wasn't attached top an individual as much as if was a force in the world, a seeing force, one that worked like a self-replicating virus, seeking to entangle, to ensnare, to undo beauty. [p.353]”