He carried Paul inside and up the stairs. He gave him a drink of water and the orange chewable aspirin he like and sat with him on the bed, holding his hand...This was what he yearned to capture on film: these rare moments where the world seemed unified, coherent, everything contained in a single fleeting image. A spareness that held beauty and hope and motion - a kind of silvery poetry, just as the body was poetry in blood and flesh and bone.

You missed a lot of heartache, sure. But David, you missed a lot of joy.

He had never even glimpsed her.

This was her life. Not the life she had once dreamed of, not a life her younger self would ever have imagined or desired, but the life she was living, with all its complexities. This was her life, built with care and attention, and it was good.

She didn't love him and he didn't love her; she was like an addiction, and what they were doing had a darkness to it, a weight.

I've been accused of trying too hard to rescue people

Grief, it seemed, was a physical place.

It wasn't right. He knew that, but it was like falling: once you started you couldn't stop until something stopped you.

Lately, the world felt fragile, like a blown egg, as if it might shatter beneath a careless touch.