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21 " She knew happiness was only one side of the coin and the coin was forever turning . . . Thomasina had every reason to be happy, but instead she held her heart at the same level she had always held it, because she did not trust extremes of feeling. "
― Kathleen Winter , Annabel
22 " Whereas he struck out on his own to decide how to erase the frightening ambiguity in their child, she envisioned living with it as it was . . . Whenever she imagined her child, grown up without interference from a judgemental world, she imagined its male and female halves as complementing each other, and as being secretly, almost magically powerful. "
23 " Wayne had never been able to love the dog Treadway brought home the day he dismantled the Ponte Vecchio. He wanted to love the dog but he couldn’t, and he blamed his father. “The dog deserved love.”“I know. Love gets blocked if you dam it. Your father builds dams in his sleep. He doesn’t know he’s doing it.” Wayne had a dog he could not love though he wanted to love it, and Treadway had a son he could not love though he wanted a son and he wanted to love that son. Father and son suffered from backed up, frozen love, and this ate Jacinta’s heart. "
24 " A lot of things can go out of order in a lonely house over a lonely autumn and the start of winter, without other people in the village knowing, especially if that village prides itself on an independent spirit. "
25 " Everyone was trying to define everything so carefully, Jacinta felt; they wanted to annihilate all questions. "
26 " He wanted to throw the pills away and wait and see what would happen to his body. How much of his body image was accurate and how much was a construct he had come to believe? He tried to see his body objectively. "
27 " She was not a person who froze someone’s character in her mind, calling this one egotistical and that one not nearly confident enough and another one truthful or untruthful. To Thomasina people were rivers, always ready to move from one state of being into another. It was not fair, she felt, to treat people as if they were finished beings. Everyone was always becoming and unbecoming. "
28 " He could see in her face that she had found a freedom he did not have. Somehow this inflexible woman had become flexible, and she was beautiful in a way that he could not attain, though she was old. "
29 " The coffee smell filled the staff room. Thomasina looked out the window at gold clouds. Everyone had such a small life it nearly drove her crazy. Perhaps it had driven her crazy. "
30 " But was there a place where she could live with truth instead of lies? Truth or Consequences was another TV show. She could relate to that title. You told the truth or you lived with consequences like these. If you held back truth you couldn’t win. You swallowed truth and it went sour in your belly and poisoned you slowly. "
31 " ... because I read about them. Anything I know about I've usually read, even a lot of what I know about trapping. I get a lot from books. "
32 " He had to remind himself that the work of a surgeon is poetry of a kind, in which blood is the meaning and flesh is the text. "
33 " Wayne had never been able to love the dog Treadway brought home the day he dismantled the Ponte Vecchio. He wanted to love the dog but he couldn’t, and he blamed his father. “The dog deserved love. "
34 " The hawk had possibly seen with its own eyes what it happened and knew better than Treadway how much Derek Warford deserved to be sunk with the stone to the bottom of a bottomless body of water. But the hawk did not recognize any of this. It did not swoop down . . . but it hovered. It hovered in front of him and it reminded him of the same words over and over again, from the books of Deuteronomy and Romans and also the book of Hebrews in the Bible Treadway kept in his trapper’s hut: Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.“When?” asked Treadway. “When is the Lord planning on getting around to it? Because I can have it done by this time tomorrow.”But the hawk used an argument Treadway had used many times himself when Jacinta had asked him to explain or justify a decision he had made. The hawk used the argument of one loan proclamation followed by silence, and in that silence, Treadway knew, he could protest all he liked, but he would not win the argument. "
35 " A traveller can come to Labrador and feel its magnetic energy or not feel it. There has to be a question in the person. The visitor has to be an open circuit, available to the power coming off the land, and not everybody is. And it is the same with a person born in Labrador. Some know, from birth, that their homeland has a respiratory system, that it pulls energy from rock and mountain and water and gravitational activity beyond earth, and that it breathes energy in return. And others don’t know it. "