“The sky was low and broody, but from here, near the treeline, you could see the forest rolling down into the valley, the lake tucked away like a pocket mirror.”

“Punk had picked the locks, sluiced out into the grid.”

“Some people think the real them is whoever they are when they're not around other people.”

“It's like Charlie's dreamed everything he lived through here.”

“William loathed his family,' Mercer said. 'With cause.”

“As ever in the family Goodman, someone would have to swallow feelings here, and it was easier that it be Mercer.”

“There is not a moment in which God does not present Himself under the cover of some pain to be endured, of some consolation to be enjoyed, or of some duty to be performed. All that takes place with...”

“I flopped on the overstuffed kitchen couch and watched him go. I wondered what would happen to all his films and photographs in the upstairs closet - the documentaries on homelessness and drug addi...”

“Wherever you will go, I will let you down, But this lullaby goes on.”

“There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone.”

“I was relying on youth be loyal to the specific variety of compromise and unhappiness, which our hard-won marriage represents.”

“It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of...”

“This is the city, and I am one of the citizens/Whatever interests the rest interests me”

“In some neighborhoods, faces mature faster than bodies.”

“My advice for aspiring writers is go to New York. And if you cant go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high, there are other people w...”