...bleak territory of the heart.

Each letter has a shape, she told them, one shape in the world and no other, and it is your responsibility to make it perfect.

He wished he had some kind of X-ray vision for the human heart.

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.

All that sunny afternoon, traveling north and east, Caroline believed absolutely in the future. And why not? For if the worst had already happened to them in the eyes of the world, then surely, surely, it was the worst that they left behind them now.

He could hardly imagine anymore what his life would be without the weight of his hidden knowledge. He'd come to think of it as a kind of penance. It was self-destructive, he could see that, but that was the way things were. People smoked, they jumped out of airplanes, they drank too much and got into their cars and drove without seat belts.

Lately, the world felt fragile, like a blown egg, as if it might shatter beneath a careless touch.