“All three are hip-deep in midlife, when the eyes go and the waistline spreads and the city on the hill that shone so brightly in youth turns out to be more like a semi-incorporated town in the middle of a garbage strike. An age when a person can feel not so much himself as an inexplicably inferior version of himself.”

“I came here because it's pine-dark and the ocean is wild. The kind of quiet-noise you need when there's too much going on in your head. Like the water and the woods are doing all the feeling, and I can hang out, quiet as a headstone, in a between place. A blank I can bear.”

“The horsemen thatching the roof with feathers are a likeness of people who go forth into the world to seek riches and fortune. When they return their houses are bare, and so they go on for everThe young man dragging up the trees to make a fire is a likeness of those who labour for others: much trouble they have, but they never warm themselves at the fire.The three heads in the wells are three kinds of men. Some there are who give freely when they get freely; some who give freely though they get little; some who get much and give little—and they are the worst of the three…”

“So this is life. Love. We spend all this time reaching for each other and mostly we end up hurting each other until it's over.”

“I wish I believed him. He's looking at me like he can see where I begin.”

“It is so long before the mind can persuade itself that she whom we saw every day and whose very existence appeared a part of our own can have departed forever—that the brightness of a beloved eye can have been extinguished and the sound of a voice so familiar and dear to the ear can be hushed, never more to be heard.”

“Alas! Victor, when falsehood can look so like the truth, who can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?”