“what twists or rage greater than we could ever guess had savaged skylines, thousands of lives?”

“Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.”

“His eyes are blazing with light, more light than all the lights in every city in the whole world, more light than we could ever invent if we had ten thousand billion years.”

“We are all poor in respect to a thousand savage comforts, though surrounded by luxuries...for our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in 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.”

“Snow Flower was my old same for life. I had a greater and deeper love for her than I could ever feel for a person who was my husband.”