Galore

He wasn’t a religious man but a vision of what Paradise might be came to him, a windowed room afloat on an endless sea, walls packed floor to ceiling with all the books ever written or dreamed of. It was nearly enough to make giving up the world bearable.

From what I have seen of the world, Reverend, motherhood is a certainty, but fatherhood is a subject of debate.

He was struck by the sensation she’d made it happen in some way, that his life was simply a story the old woman was making up in her head.

Levi’s motives were never quite as obvious. There was an Old Testament ruthlessness about him, Shambler thought, something inscrutably tribal at the root.

They never lost their way or seemed even momentarily uncertain of their location. They traveled narrow paths cut through tuckamore and bog or took shortcuts along the shoreline, chancing the unpredictable sea ice. Every hill and pond and stand of trees, every meadow and droke for miles was named and catalogued in their heads. At night they navigated by the moon and stars or by counting outcrops and valleys or by the smell of spruce and salt water and wood smoke. It seemed to Newman they had an additional sense lost to modern men for lack of use.

Mary Tryphena said, It's the only thing the world gives us, you know. The right to say yes or no to love.

He was a tree stump of a man, limited in his outlook but rooted and unshakeable in his certainties.