“Pouring breakfast cereal into a bowl, he saw his life crashing down in smoking ruins.”

“There he lay spooked, a spinning wheel in a celestial bowling alley.”

“He was a peculiar sight. Tears rolling down his face, shouting to drown the sound of the singing rabbit; he said he needed help, pointed to a chicken, handed over some money, grabbed his parcel and bolted out the door in panic.Boys, thought the butcher.Drugs, thought the woman.Justin Case, thought Dorothea.”

“It might cause considerable surprise to the informed observer (who does not exist) to note that Mr B's eyes begin to fill with tears. They overflow and spill down along the deep soft creases of his careworn face as he sits very still in the centre of the unstill world and weeps rivers of salty water for all the lost souls, including his own.”

“I studied Finn the way another boy might have studied history, determined to memorize his vocabulary, his movements, his clothes, what he said, what he did, what he thought. What ideas circulated in his head when he looked distracted? What did he dream about?But most of all what I wanted was to see myself through his eyes, to define myself in relation to him, to sift out what was interesting in me (what he must have liked, however insignificant) and distill it into a purer, bolder, more compelling version of myself.The truth is, for that brief period of my life I failed to exist if Finn wasn't looking at me. And so I copied him, strove to exist the way he existed: to stretch, languid and graceful when tired, to move swiftly and with determination when not, to speak rarely and with force, to smile in a way that rewarded the world.”

“Eventually everyone came out of the water and for hours and hours and hours we lay under the tree and talked and read and occasionally someone got up to throw a stick for the dogs and Piper played with Ding and made tiny woven wreaths of poppies and daisies to decorate his baby horns and Isaac whistled back and forth to a robin and Edmond just lay there smoking and telling me he loved me without saying anything out loud and if there ever was a more perfect day in the history of time it isn't one I've heard about.The sun waited to go down longer than usual that day so we kept putting off the moment we had to leave and the boys and dogs swam in the river again and eventually we all headed back practically in the dark, dog-tired and too happy to talk much.I guess there was a war going on somewhere in the world that night but it wasn't one that could touch us.”

“In the meantime, Bob was jumping up and down and pronouncing it was all "good good good," so good that he couldn't stop giggling with self-satisfied glee like a demented toddler.”