“Being a doctor he didn't want for choices, but also being a doctor he understood the fragility of bone and sinew that encompassed the even more fragile organ of the heart. He envisioned Therese's as being wound in intricate, tight, vinelike veins that he would slowly make sense of and unravel.”

“It was, for the time being, an empty threat, and he must have sensed it also, for he laughed easily and with contempt. “You will do what your masters tell you to do, doctor. As do we all.”

“A child blind from birth doesn't even know he's blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it.”

“I am too fucking fragile. I hate being fragile.”

“This was not before doctors, but in Turkey they hadn't gotten around to claiming the bone business yet; milkmen still were in charge of bones, the logic being that since milk was so good for bones, who would know more about borken bones than a milkman?”

“Listen to God with a broken heart. He is not only the doctor who mends it, but also the father who wipes away the tears.”