“...a vase full of flowers: dark red and pale pink in a cloud of baby's breath.”

“When he reached the desk he handed Caroline a photograph in a dark blue cardboard frame. It was a portrait, black and white, faintly tinted. The woman looking out wore a pale peach sweater. Her hair was gently waved, her eyes a deep shade of blue. Rupert Dean's wife, Emelda, dead now for twenty years. "She was te love of my life," he announced to Caroline, his voice so loud that people looked up.”

“The place was a familiar as breath but as far from his life now as the moon.”

“...and the distance between them, millimeters only, the space of a breath, opened up and deepened, became a cavern at whose edge he stood.”

“Away from the bright motion of the party, she carried her sadness like a dark stone clenched in her palm.”

“She didn't love him and he didn't love her; she was like an addiction, and what they were doing had a darkness to it, a weight.”

“There was in the mountains, and perhaps in the world at large, a theory of compensation that held that for everything given something else was immediately and visibly lost. "Well, you've got the smarts even if your cousin did get the looks." Compliments, seductive as flowers, thorny with their opposites: "Yes, you may be smart but you sure are ugly; You may look nice but you didn't get a brain." Compensation; balance in the universe.”