“Our habit of wishing backward from what is to what might have been is the soft but persistent tapping that cracks the crystal.”

“The atom was split by persistence.”

“Spirit was a by-product of activity, like the reflection from a spinning fan blade, and our souls in the end did not reside within us but flowed outward from our movements.”

“What was more humiliating, I wondered: having to beg for someone's cold chicken bones or being offered them?”

“His thoughts were clearly still shoving him further away, toward some ultimate dark drama that he might or might not have actually lived through but whose telling would let out the pressure inside his skull.”

“I understood that no one lives forever, but there are certain people whose power and presence so thoroughly penetrate your view of things that contemplating their absence feels as strange as imagining having never been born yourself.”

“To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your “Core Attachments,” means apologizing for your very existence.”