“One picks one's way about through the glass and aluminum doors, the receptionists' smiles, the lunches with too much alcohol, the openings with more, the mobs of people desperately trying to define good taste in such loud voices one can hardly hear oneself giggle, while the shebang is lit by flashes and flares through the paint-stained window, glimmers under the police-locked door, or, if one is taking a rare walk outside that day, by a light suffusing the whole sky, complex as the northern aurora.”

“Survival often depends on a specific focus: A relationship, a belief, or a hope balanced on the edge of possibility. Or something more ephemeral: the way the sun passes through the hard seemingly impenetrable glass of a window and warms the blanket, or how the wind, invisible but for its wake, is so loud one can hear it through the insulated walls of a house.”

“What's the hurry?" he said"This door is locked," Tully told him."So?""Can you pick a lock?""I'll give it a try.""Be my guest" Tully said, stepping to one side.Pap blew the lock away with the shotgun. He pushed the door open with the barrel.”

“A devious spark lit through Al, making me smile. One way. It costs too much, he said. “There’s no inflation in the ever-after, Al.” Call it a recession then. One way.”

“She couldn't see him, but his voice was like light through a stained-glass window in a cathedral.”

“In office buildings and retail premises in which entry is through double doors and one of those doors is locked for no reason, the door must bear a large sign saying: “This Door Is Locked for No Reason.”