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.

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.

His love for her was so deeply woven with resentment that he could not untangle the two.

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.

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.

You can't spend the rest of your life tiptoeing around to try and avert disaster. It won't work. You'll just end up missing the life you have.

A fear Paul had transformed all these years, like a gifted alchemist, into anger and rebellion.