“All this occupied his thoughts when he revisited the places of his war. Tramping over soil fed by the blood of men he had led and whose faces now stirred in his memory, it was his wife's response that came - as if in compensation for too little said before - when he wondered why his wandering had led him back to these old battlefields: in his sixty-ninth year he was establishing his survivor's status.”

“He was only thirty-eight. His body was clean, well-fed, and benign. He had all his teeth. A fresh Armenian joke stirred in his head like a child in its mother's womb. He thought life was wonderful.”

“[My grandfather] returned to what he called ‘studying.’ He sat looking down at his lap, his left hand idle on the chair arm, his right scratching his head, his white hair gleaming in the lamplight. I knew that when he was studying he was thinking, but I did not know what about. Now I have aged into knowledge of what he thought about. He thought of his strength and endurance when he was young, his merriment and joy, and how his life’s burdens had then grown upon him. He thought of that arc of country that centered upon Port William as he first had known it in the years just after the Civil War, and as it had changed, and as it had become; and how all that time, which would have seemed almost forever when he was a boy, now seemed hardly anytime at all. He thought of the people he remembered, now dead, and of those who had come and gone before his knowledge, and of those who would come after, and of his own place in that long procession.”

“There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot;there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth-yet thewaters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and alove of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealizeddreams......And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he haddetermined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from thepersonalities he had passed...He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky.I know myself," he cried, "but that is all.”

“Then a calm fell upon him. The gushing began from all sorts of places, all over his body. He heard pleasurable little giggles on the outer edges of his mind, in the dark creases behind his thoughts. He felt good, better than he’d felt in years. As if he were inside a huge embrace. And he felt as if he had finally reached the right place, his home, his motherland.”

“Now he reduced his progress to the rhythm of his boots -- he walked across the land until he came to the sea. Everything that impeded him had to be outweighed, even if only by a fraction, by all that drove him on. In one pan of the scales, his wound, thirst, the blister, tiredness, the heat, the aching in his feet and legs, the Stukas, the distance, the Channel; in the other, I'll wait for you, and the memory of when she had said it, which he had come to treat like a sacred site. Also, the fear of capture. His most sensual memories -- their few minutes in the library, the kiss in Whitehall -- was bleached colorless through overuse. He knew by heart certain passages from her letters, he had revisited their tussle with the vase by the fountain, he remembered the warmth from her arm at the dinner when the twins went missing. These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as B.C. and A.D. Before prison, before war, before the sight of a corpse became a banality.But these heresies died when he read her last letter. He touched his breast pocket. It was a kind of genuflection. Still there. Here was something new on the scales. That he could be cleared had all the simplicity of love. Merely tasting the possibility reminded him of how much had narrowed and died. His taste for life, no less, all the old ambitions and pleasures. The prospect was of rebirth, a triumphant return.”