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.

Norah watched him, serious and utterly absorbed in his task, overcome by the simple fact of his existence.

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.

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

The place was a familiar as breath but as far from his life now as the moon.

She had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love-- nothing, now, but bones.

...bleak territory of the heart.