"It was a typical morning. The cockerel was crowing. The dog was scratching behind his ear. The aroma of coffee wafted through the house. The parrot mimicked Papa’s voice. We could hear the sound of a broom scraping the ground in next-door’s yard, and the strains of a radio blaring somewhere in the neighbourhood."
"In the month of May, 1898, on his wedding night, Thomas Griffith Smolders was chased around his hotel room, not by his bride, as you might expect, but by a ball of fire—luminous and strangely cool."
"When I hit the bitumen and get that smooth grey rumble going under me everything’s hell different. Like I’m in a fresh new world all slick and flat and easy."
"When I walked through the large iron gate of the hospital, I must have still been alive."
"His wife had died in June and there was to be a memorial service for her in two weeks, at the end of the summer."
"First it was the tabular icebergs, which appeared floating in the local pool. Narwhals got in through a crack in the tiles at the bottom."
"Some time ago—never mind how long precisely—I slipped off the map of the world. I took the manuscript with me."
"The unblinking eyes met the stares of the passersby and tourists who poured into the square from all directions."
"The idea was to let their adult son live on his own. After years of group homes and institutions and finally time spend in their care, his parents—he an inventor, and she a dour, nervous woman—purchased a two-story house on Bay Meadows Court and helped their son move into a subdivision just inside the outer belt with its constant noise of traffic."
"On days when I felt calmer I would imagine myself picking out someone I didn’t know in some public place, on the sidewalk or in the aisle of a supermarket, and telling them my whole story, everything that had happened."
“The rain had been falling with a pounding meanness, without ceasing for two days, and then the water rose all at once in the middle of the night, a brutal rush so fast Asher thought at first a dam might have broken somewhere upstream.”
“Sonja’s sitting in Folke’s office. It took a long time to get here, as she kept taking detours.”
“We heard about the bears almost from the moment we arrived in the mountains.”
“On a Tuesday I came home from school to an empty house, watched the evening news, and then took two Equanil caplets lifted from my mother. Nothing happened, so after an hour I took three more, and then maybe more after that, I can’t remember.”
“At the time, Luís Tinoco was twenty-one. He was of medium height, bright-eyed, tousle-haired, inexhaustibly loquacious, impetuous, and passionate.”
“In the first few hours, confusion. The numbers kept changing. The French were saying 121 dead, which meant—according to the manifest—there must be 11 alive.”
“First he would have to go and see his mother. He would tell her—something about Vanessa, not everything of course.”
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