Norah looked at her son’s tiny face, surprised, as always, by his name. he had not grown into it yet, he still wore it like a wrist band, something that might easily slip off and disappear. She had read about people – where? she could not remember this either – who refused to name their children for several weeks, feeling them to be not yet of the earth, suspended still between two worlds.

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

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

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

After Memory Keepers Daughter, it took me a few months to shut out the world. I really had to turn off the Internet and sort of cloister myself away from the world again and sink into that psychic space to write again.

No one could suspect the intricate mysteries of her heart.

...bleak territory of the heart.