“At some point, Alice slipped one arm and then the other into the coat's sleeves, she buttoned its buttons, starting at the top. Silas had followed her, still not seeing what an emblem of defeat, shame, loss, hopelessness, the coat was. With such gaps in his understanding, he saw very clearly how the boy he'd been had grown up to be the man he was.”

“He held his hat in his hand; there was no disorder in his clothing; his coat was carefully buttoned: he was very pale, and he trembled slightly; his hair, which had still been gray on his arrival in Arras, was now entirely white: it had turned white during the hour he had sat there.”

“This is the girl in the borrowed trench-coat, moving across the bridge with the river Seine underneath. She pulls something from the jacket's pocket and hits the button, not answering when the man without his coat catches up with her at that moment, calling her name.Pull back fifty metres, and here is the burning apartment, debris floating softly through the air that is filled with screams. Here is the man again, gripping the shoulders of the girl with his coat and yelling into her ears, 'What have you done?'And here is that playful smile that creeps upon her lips as she disappears, the air rushing to fill the space where she had just been.”

“Even the simplest things had a glorious pointlessness to them. When buttons came in, about 1650, people couldn't get enough of them and arrayed them in decorative profusion on the backs and collars and sleeves of coats, where they didn't actually do anything. One relic of this is the short row of pointless buttons that are still placed on the underside of jacket sleeves near the cuff. These have been purely decorative and have never had a purpose, yet 350 years later on we continue to attach them as if they are the most earnest necessity.”

“I never meet a ragged boy in the street without feeling that i may owe him a salute, for I know not what possibilities may be buttoned up under his coat.”

“He seemed grown-up, compared to the boys at school, and although he was not handsome, or even particularly good-looking—there were still some scars on his face from the skin trouble he had when he was younger—his face was agreeable because it was so. . . . What was the word? Kind, perhaps. Or gentle. But strong, too. He was genuinely glad to see all of Sue’s family, and when Sue entered the room and he helped her on with her coat, Jean thought he acted as if her sister was someone precious to him.”