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61 " Thirty-one years old, and already Naaliyah was more comfortable with insects than people: they were more chemically predictable, more elegantly designed. "
― Anthony Doerr , About Grace
62 " Hadn't the actors acted of their own volition? "
63 " that a thousand choices were implicit in a single moment. "
64 " Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitrary. Winkler was still on an airplane, hurtling north, but he was also pushing farther back, sinking deeper into the overlaps, to the years before he even had a daughter, before he had even dreamed of the woman who would become his wife. "
65 " The things we see are only masks for the things we can't see. "
66 " silent desperation of everything they never said - gaps and absences in every conversation, the past circumscribing the present, the future hemming in the past. "
67 " You lose sleep, you lose your appetite, but eventually you fall asleep and eventually you eat - you may hate yourself for it, but the body's demands are incontrovertible. He had always felt guilty about that, that he went on living, eating tomato sandwiches, going to Iditarod Days with his father, making snowballs, when his mother could not. "
68 " How few days are left in the lives of anyone. How few hours. "
69 " It was wrong and impossible and illicit and yet each minute with the boy was a gift, a scene from a story he could not leave. "
70 " Studying ice crystals as a graduate student, he eventually found the basic design (equilateral, equiangled hexagon) so icily repeated, so unerringly conforming, that he couldn't help but shudder: Beneath the splendor--the filigreed blossoms, the microscopic stars--was a ghastly inevitability; crystals could not escape their embedded blueprints any more than humans could. Everything hewed to a rigidity of pattern, the certainty of death. "
71 " So many human beings, none of them seeing clearly. "
72 " The sky a pit of violet, edged with black. "
73 " his heart laced with regret. "
74 " All the events of his life were compressing to singularity: one night, one hour. "
75 " In the infinite permutation of an ice crystal, everything repeats itself, but, really, from another point of view, nothing repeats itself. "
76 " To a certain extent, time was malleable, what he did did matter. Grace was proof of that. Naaliyah was alive. "
77 " Together, the unlikeliest of penitents, silently, grafting words to air, they sent their prayers into the room. "
78 " March, rain at the windows, and he had to be up at five the next morning. He listened to the click and patter of drops against the panes. "
79 " had felt time settle over itself, imbricate and fix into place the vertigo of future aligning with the present. "
80 " Fifteen and a half years as incontestable, a continent he'd never visit, a staircase he'd never climb. "