“Louis thought he would be all for a back-to-the-basics drive in education: a teacher, an olive tree, a bit of midday wine (the Greeks had watered theirs down to keep their heads lucid), and, last but not least, six or seven eager and receptive youths seated at one’s feet.”

“Why not simply surrender to one’s doom, since one was so clearly, so spectacularly, doomed?”

“Our students didn’t used to come from such damaged families,” Louis mused. “It’s true what they say. This country really is coming apart at the seams.”

“The angel descended when you were least expecting it. Tracy felt something quietly go click in his despairing heart.”

“That’s the way Chris lives, warning everyone who gets close of the lightning that may strike. Never touch anything, never make a mark. But Anatole can’t live that way. The world’s too lonely a place: he has to touch things, he has to put his arms around them.”

“Absolutely, love matters,” she reiterated. “We forget that at our own risk.”

“You get exactly what you want, Anatole’s always suspected, only when you get it it’s no longer what you want, you need something else.”

“He wanted to toast mad idealism, forbidden desires, the dreams that drove one to criminal acts. He wanted, quite starkly, oblivion.”

“Tracy had never been so conscious of the sky above the earth, the dangerous clouds that gathered there, the way humans lived beneath such grandeur and threat every moment of their lives.”

“Shirtless, they’d stretch out in the long grass and take the healing brunt of a noontime sun that gave no clue of the thunderheads it already, in secret, had begun to breed.”

“If certain places you came to in life felt right, then how many others were just as clearly the wrong place to be?”