"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.”
“'If you have to drink, then do it someplace where it won’t bother anyone,' his wife had said.”
“For Her it was no small problem, to respond to his wish in light of what she could fathom of it: to understand the request without even being clear on what a 'man of her life' might be.”
“À l'oeuvre on reconnaît l'artisan. You can tell an artist by his handiwork.”
“The year I lick so much LSD off stamps I have to use Elmer’s glue to back the twenty-center for a postcard cash request to my mother, that I am alive note at the end of term, is the year of all the 'wine' parties.”
“Singer suffered from a peculiar sense of shame that didn’t bother him on a daily basis but did pop up occasionally; he would remember some sort of painful misunderstanding that made him stop short, rigid as a post, with a look of despair on his face, which he immediately hid by holding up both hands as he loudly exclaimed: 'No, no!' ”
“First, she was the sound of a breaking branch. A splintered knucklecrack shattering the quiet of these western Montana woods.”
"Isaac Page rides shotgun in a Chevy Cavalier. Backpack between his feet. The Grand River behind him.”
“One day garrett asked Berg to help him drop off Vespucci’s father’s canoe at the local boatbuilder’s shop. They loaded it onto the roof of his truck and drove north along the bay.”
“ 'You’re not a monster,’ Mother used to say. ‘Just a little beast.’ ”
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