“...nobody belongs to that world...Nobody feels as if they belong, at any rate. They're all watching each other--fearful of the laughter coming from across the room, wondering to themselves, are they the target? Are they the joke?”

“—that if she touched him right now, their flesh would recognize each other. The wildest thought: these scars, his and hers, would speak to each other, communicating intimacies that could not be unshared.”

“You are...beyond my imagination. It's a wonder you can be touched at all.”

“Canada is lovely," she breathed against his lips. "And you are lovely."His laughter ghosted into her mouth. "That's my line, Lyd. You are supposed to think me handsome”

“Some people were like that; they could not escape criticism, because they never quite managed to convince themselves of the role everyone believed they should fill.”

“And he wondered, suddenly, what sort of divide it created between them, that he knew pieces of her that she had never shared with him - facts and stories and moments and memories to which she had no idea he was privy. He had collected them for so long, denying to himself that this acquisition was anything more than casual amusement, when in fact it was zealous, and jelaous besides; diwowning as accidental the fact that he never forgot a single remark she made, or that others made about her, and that he approved of these other people, or disdained them, according to their treatment of her. Such a lopsided intimacy existed between him and her. Inevitably, it created a chasm whose depth neither of them could know until they tried to chart it. Would this chasm prove impossible to bridge?”

“She knew his secret: for all his wandering, his independence and his unorthodox ways, he took his responsibilities very seriously. He even borrowed others' responsibilities, making them his own simply because he thought this sort of service was owed to those whom he loved.”