They turned a distracted gaze on the world, wide-eyed, somehow, and questioning.

This is what he knew that Paul didn't: the world was precarious and sometimes cruel. He'd had to fight hard to achieve what Paul simply took for granted.

My first job was in a nursing home - a terrible place in retrospect. It was in an old house, and the residents were so lonely. People rarely visited them. I only stayed there a couple of months, but it made a strong impression on me.

A moment was not a single moment at all, but rather an infinite number of different moments, depending on who was seeing things and how.

Once, this whole world had been hidden beneath a shallow sea.

Your understanding of a place changes the longer you stay; you discover more, and your own life gets woven into the fabric of the community.

She didn't love him and he didn't love her; she was like an addiction, and what they were doing had a darkness to it, a weight.