“One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.”

“I guessed that only at the last possible minute did the soul in a determined fashion flee the dying flesh. Who could blame it for its reluctance? We loved our lives more than we ever knew, and at the end felt the bounty of them, as one would say in church, felt even the richness of their missed opportunities, or just understood that they were more than we had realized during the living of them and a lot to give up.”

“For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.”

“I had one elegantly folded cookie—a short paper nerve baked in an ear.”

“Amber was not shy. If she had been shy, not one of us would be at Perkins right now.”

“Blasts from the past were like the rooms one entered and re-entered in dreams: they would not stay nailed down. When you returned to them, they had changed - they suddenly had more space or a tilt or a door that had not been there before. New people were milling around, the floors undulated, and the sun shone newly, strangely in the windows, or through the now blasted-open ceiling, or else it shone not at all, as if having fled the sky.”

“Everyone these days was defensive about their lives. Everyone had settled.”