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,...

You’re right, Norah, anything can happen, anytime. But what goes wrong isn’t your fault. You can’t spend the rest of your life tiptoeing around to try and avert disaster. It won’t work. You’ll just end...

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

She imagined herself as some sort of vessel to be filled up with love. But it wasn’t like that. The love was within her all the time, and its only renewal came from giving it...

Away from the bright motion of the party, she carried her sadness like a dark stone clenched in her palm.

Photography is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell.

Rows and rows of books lined the shelves and I let my eyes linger on the sturdy spines, thinking how human books were, so full of ideas and images, worlds imagined, worlds perceived; full of...

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,...

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

He’d kept this silence because his own secrets were darker, more hidden, and because he believed that his secrets had created hers.

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.

Some dreams matter, illuminate a crucial choice or reveal some intuition that’s trying to push its way to the surface. Other, though, are detritus, the residue of the day reassembling itself in some disjointed and...

It seemed there was no end at all to the lies a person could tell, once she got started.

The world beyond the water was a blue of green and stone and blue. A moment later Yoshi pushed through, the water pouring down in sheets so smooth it looked like glass, and stepped into...

… the Iroquois take dreams very seriously. They see them as the secret wishes of the soul–the heart’s desire, so to speak. Not all dreams, maybe, but the important ones. [p.254]

In some deep place in her heart, Caroline had kept alive the silly romantic notion that somehow David Henry had once known her as no one else ever could. But it was not true. He...

Think of it, Dad. What if I have it in me to do that, and I don’t try?

After all these years, I feel so free. Who knows where I might fly?

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

It’s funny how things seem different, suddenly.

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.

No one could suspect the intricate mysteries of her heart.

On an impulse he went into the room and stood before the window, pushing aside the sheer curtain to watch the snow, now nearly eight inches high on the lampposts and the fences and the...

The thing is, I used to like that: feeling special because I knew something no one else did. It’s a kind of power, isn’t it, knowing a secret? But lately I don’t like it so...

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...