“I said nothing. If she wasn't careful, everyone would rush out of her life, life out of a burning building.”

“There were moments bristling with deadness, when she looked out at her life and went, "What?" Or worse, feeling interrupted and tired, "Wha—?”

“It had started to worry me that if I wasn't careful my meekness could become a habit, a tic, something hardwired that my mannerisms would continue to express throughout my life regardless of my efforts - the way a drunk who, though in the wagon, still staggers and slurs like a drunk.”

“I always had the sense with her that she didn't suffer fools gladly but that life was taking great pains to show her how.”

“I felt nothing like a horse, whose instincts I knew were to run and run. I had mostly in life tried to stand still like a glob of coral so as not to be spotted by sharks. But now I had crawled out onto land and was somehow already a horse.”

“You only live at once." Which seemed to her all the more reason to be careful, to take it easy, to have an ordinary life.”

“She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.”