“A four-year-old has so little past, and he remembers almost none of it, neither the father he once had nor the house where he once lived. But he can feel the absences and feel them as sensation, l...”

“Long past the moment when her neck begins to stiffen and ache, she continues to stare into the darkness, even though none of the human secrets she needs to know are to be found in the stars but rat...”

“A gust of wind doesn't suddenly bang a door open. A clock doesn't chime. The phone doesn't ring. Yet in the next instant the stillness breaks as if it is crystal.”

“The limitless, lowering sky, the long stretches of motionless empty prairie, the silence, complete right down to the absence of birdsong -- who knows what decides a man to leave most of his words u...”

“When night comes on in a room lit by kerosene, any flicker of the flame can give the sense that darkness is about to triumph.”

“Autumn has come to northeast Montana. The vapor of ones breath, the clarity of the stars, the smell of wood smoke, the stones underfoot that even a full day of sunlight wont warm- these all say the...”

“Those whom we most love are often the most alien to us.”

“He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.”

“Ivan tells Anna: "I used to imagine that being embraced by a woman . . . as something so wonderful that it would make me forget everthing . . . [But] happiness, it turns out, will be to share with ...”

“The smell of home was indistinguishable from the smell of leaving home: each inhalation a mix of familiarity and fear.”

“When you have been with your partner for so many years, they become the glove compartment map that you've worn dog-eared and white-creased, the trail you recogonize so well you could draw it by hea...”

“I never wanted to live in that place again, but if for some reason I was forced to live there again, I would never accept the harsh judgments made against me by people whose only power to do so was...”