The Lake of Dreams grew gradually, over many years, elements and ideas accruing until they gained enough critical mass to become a novel.

...and the distance between them, millimeters only, the space of a breath, opened up and deepened, became a cavern at whose edge he stood.

He carried Paul inside and up the stairs. He gave him a drink of water and the orange chewable aspirin he like and sat with him on the bed, holding his hand...This was what he yearned to capture on film: these rare moments where the world seemed unified, coherent, everything contained in a single fleeting image. A spareness that held beauty and hope and motion - a kind of silvery poetry, just as the body was poetry in blood and flesh and bone.

He fished in his pocket for his keys and instead pulled out the last geode, gray and smooth, earth-shaped. He held it, warming in his palm, thinking of all mysteries the world contained: layers of stone, concealed beneath the flesh of earth and grass; these dull rocks, with their glimmering hidden hearts.

Then she had been a fiancee, a young wife, and a mother, and she had discovered that these words were far too small ever to contain the experience.

A moment might be a thousand different things.

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