"As they passed under the water the eyes closed, and this sent a reverberation through Craig that was not relief. He waited, watched as the lips parted and the mouth filled with brack. He resisted the limp-flailing arms that slapped at his chest, his shoulders, never reaching his face. He wondered how long it would take such a man to drown. He did not think it would be long."

"It barked once before it turned and ran—barked, because she had no other word for it, and not really once, but in a strange, reverberating chorus, a chaotic rumble like a hundred dogs barking, like a pack falling upon the fox: and there was that squealing in it too."

"She wasn't sure exactly how it had started; nothing particular was said, no agreements made, but as they had walked side by side around the city—the Met, Battery Park, St. John's, everything you're supposed to see—she had known that they were suddenly, intensely together, and each word had become a stitch, a little stab followed by a pulling closer."

"I do not know what would have happened if Mike had ever been fast enough to tag us (if it could, after so long, have been as gentle as that). Perhaps we would have become the monsters and he would have become one of us and the sweethearts would have poured out of him onto the grass or leapt up from the ground to swarm us. Or perhaps the game would have ended."

"As Miriam came to stand beside him, he turned to show her what he was holding, though he did not look at her: it was the body of a bird, its feathers standing out perfectly white against its tiny pink beak and orange feet. It was small and deflated looking, with its neck extended and laid against He's palm in a soft curve, an oddly inviting angle, like a beautiful virgin in an old movie."

"Along a dried riverbed she found a place where a cow had died. All around the scrubby grass was flattened, the stalks bent or torn, and she wondered if the animal had been thrashing. Her husband had told her how they starve, the old ones who can't eat, or the weak ones when the summer is so hot that the ground cracks and plants shrivel. He'd told her how they lie on the ground and paddle their legs, scoring dark marks into the earth, as if they could swim to the end of the world and pull themselves out of it. He'd told her this to frighten her, and had succeeded."

"Lucille Fitch, despite a slim frame and a well-bred delicacy, gave birth to five children in her relatively short life. Her first, Peter, died at only a few weeks old of SIDs—or crib-death as it was called at the time—an event which shook her confidence badly, but which the doctors assured her was an unexplainable and unrepeatable as the history of the world itself. Her last child, Michael, was a mongoloid. The middle three were normal, or at least healthy: Sarah first, then Charles, and then, to Lucy's complete surprise, an atomic bomb."

"Nora could not remember what exactly he had done to get the bottle of whiskey, if she had ever, indeed, heard that part of the story. She would always pause at this point in the telling and take a long breath, as if to leave space for the missing words, before going on to explain that the next time the prospectors saw Fenstick, two weeks and nearly 100 miles later, he was covered from head to toe in black and green bruises and holding a full bottle of Jim Beam Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey."

"One day my grandfather was out driving. This was after the war, after my grandparents were married and living in Pennsylvania with my aunt Sarah, before my father was born. As he was driving, he became sure that he had hit something back along the road behind him, so he turned around to check."

"Time may forgive you for it, or forget you. Do not dream of monuments for sons of sons to marvel at, and perhaps the world will never dream of Gethsemane or Geronimo or Starbuck on the bridge."

"I was born at the age of thirty-two with a Ph.D. in comparative religion. It happened in May, almost five years ago now, when a small blood clot that had been forming in the muscle of my calf unhooked itself from the wall of its blood vessel and went traveling"

"But he knows that if he touches her now he will later remember the path his hands took, and he will think of it every time he looks at her body—the invisible, ineradicable snail-trails he's drawn onto her cleanliness."

"For my own part, I just worried that they'd be lonely—heaven is full of old people and babies and doesn't offer much for teenage girls. I imagine them, listless and awkward in their wrinkling gowns, stuck with each other, and no one else dressed up."

"The facts are widely known: On September 25th, 1998, a rain storm started in Western Massachusetts. The rain, while heavy at times, was not unseasonable, and outside of a higher than average number of traffic accidents, local news stations reported nothing out of the ordinary that evening."

"In your dream it had been dismantled piece by piece by mice or creatures that looked like mice but were really white balls of negative space or static that looked more like cotton than like mice."

"By the time she had found him she was transformed completely (if, in fact, she had ever been otherwise) into the wild, knotted hair, the wilder eyes, the badly-abused clothes, and the hostile looks that made people on the street assume there was something wrong with her."