He and his wife loved each other and brought each other daily pain. Everything else he was doing in his life, even his longing for Lalitha, amounted to little more than flight from circumstance. He and Patty couldn't live together and couldn't imagine living apart. Each time he thought they'd reached the unbearable breaking point, it turned out that there was still further they could go without breaking.

But she was seventeen now and not actually dumb. She knew that you could love somebody more than anything and still not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things.

I hate that word dysfunction.

Popularity has become its own justification.

It took hours to turn the clock back 30 seconds.

Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.

I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.