They were here all at once, but not together. Survival took self-absorption, and it made them strangers with nothing to do and no way to relate. Emergencies gave you a shape and a plot to take part in, while death was no story at all. It left you nothing.

Healing wasn’t always the best thing. Sometimes a hole was better left open. Sometimes it healed too thick and too well and left separate pieces fused and incompetent. And it was harder to reopen after that.

Once Paul told her that the beach was like him because it changed every day but it never made any progress. Later she remembered thinking that a normal person might have begun by saying that he was like the beach.

When there is nothing, there is the possibility of everything.

His distress and pleasure mixed and married, giving birth to several anxious children.

Every life I start with her, my original sin. I know myself through her.

There are going to be moments of deep, deep doubts, and you have to have faith that your initial idea was good and just muddle through.