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81 " Her stern manner and her humorless regime mask bitterness far deeper than any of her children or her husband imagine. She has never recovered from the shock of becoming a wife and then a mother. She is still dismayed every morning when she first sees her children, peaceful, sleeping, in their beds when she goes to wake them, that as often as not the feeling she has is one of resentment, of loss. These feelings frighten her so much that she has buried them under layer upon layer of domestic strictness. She has managed, in the dozen years since becoming a wife and mother, to half-convince herself that this nearly martial ordering of her household is, in fact, the love that she is so terrified that she does not have. When one of her children wakes with a fever and a painful cough early one freezing January morning, instead of kissing the child’s forehead and tucking him or her in more snugly and boiling water for a mug of honey and lemon water, she says that it is not man’s lot to be at ease in this world and that if she took a day off every time she had a sniffle or a stiff neck, the house would unravel around them all and they would be like birds with no nest, so get up and get dressed and help your brother with the wood, your sister with the water, and yanks the covers off the shivering child and throws its cold clothes at it and says, Go get dressed, unless you want a good dousing. She has convinced herself, at least in the light of day, that this is love, that this is the best way she can raise her children to be strong. She could not live with herself if she allowed herself to believe that she treated her own this way because she felt no more connected to them than she would to a collection of stones. "
― Paul Harding , Tinkers
82 " He saw no reason to doubt that his shadow dreamed just as he did for the reason that he could imagine himself to be a shadow of something - someone - else and that perhaps even his sleep, his dreams, constituted his duty as a shadow of someone else and that perhaps while THAT someone else dreamed, he was free to live his waking life, so that this alternating, interdependent series of lives formed a sort of intaglio; the waking day of each shadow was the opposite side of its possessor's sleep. "
― Paul Harding
