“A few miles away across the East River was the apartment he could never get used to, the job where he had nothing to do, the dozen or so people he knew slightly and cared about not at all: a fabric of existence as blank and seamless as the freshly plaster wall he passed. Soon his wife would return from New Jersey. Soon everyone would be back, and things would go on much as they had before. From the street outside came the sound of laughter and shouting, bottles breaking, voices droning in the warm air, and children playing far past their bedtime. It all meant nothing whatever to Lowell. Standing in the parlor of a house no longer his, listening to the voices of people whose lives were closed to him forever, contemplating a future much like his past, he realized that it was finally too late for him. Everything had gone wrong, and he had succeeded at nothing, and he was never going to have any kind of life at all.”

“God, it would never go away, this anger, this rage that was like the ceaseless movement of the spring winds through the desert, this knot in his guts, this splinter in his heart that shot a pain through him that eventually found its way into his lungs, then out of his mouth and into the open air, the sound making the whole world turn away from him. It would never go away, never, never, and there would never be any peace. [...] Maybe he had it all wrong, maybe he wasn't a victim at all, not at all, because he had decided that this was the only thing that would ever be truly his, and so he clung to it, would cling to it forever.”

“It was not so much that he lied as that there was no truth to tell. He had had his life and it was over and then he went on living it again with different people and more money, with the best of the same places, and some new ones.You kept from thinking and it was all marvelous. You were equipped with good insides so that you did not go to pieces that way, the way most of them had, and you made an attitude that you cared nothing for the work you used to do, now that you could no longer do it. But, in yourself, you said that you would write about these people; about the very rich; that you were really not of them but a spy in their country; that you would leave it and write of it and for once it would be written by some one who knew what he was writing of. But he would never do it, because each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all.”

“He was about to go home, about to return to the place where he had had a family. It was in Godric’s Hollow that, but for Voldemort, he would have grown up and spent every school holiday. He could have invited friends to his house. . . . He might even have had brothers and sisters. . . . It would have been his mother who had made his seventeenth birthday cake. The life he had lost had hardly ever seemed so real to him as at this moment, when he knew he was about to see the place where it had been taken from him.”

“In all his years as a cop he had never felt this helpless, as though he had one hand tied behind his back. He had always been able to sort everything out. People came to him the same way they went to Father Andrew.Now he was watching this family, his family, die a little every day and there was nothing he could do to save them.The worst thoughts of all came in the middle of the night. He would wake from a sound sleep with his heart racing and just knew that wherever Lockie was he was suffering. He was suffering and he was probably just waiting for Pete to come and save him the way the teacher told all the kids every year.”

“Though nothing much had happened, he felt that he had seen and experienced enough that day - thus securing his tomorrow. For today he required no more, no sight or conversation, and above all nothing new. Just to rest, to close his eyes and ears; just to inhale and exhale would be effort enough. He wished it was bedtime. Enough of being in the light and out of doors; he wanted to be in the dark, in the house, in his room. But he had also had enough of being alone; he felt, as time passed, that he was experiencing every variety of madness and that his head was bursting. He recalled how, years ago, when it had been his habit to taken afternoon walks on lonely bypaths, a strange uneasiness had taken possession of him, leading him to believe that he had dissolved in the air and ceased to exist.”