Sublime

he saw himself as the kind of man who read things on the wind, living from divining the big wins and taking the losses as expenses on the way.

Rabbit at Rest,

After ‘a few years’ Patrick was able to return to his family. This is remarkable: how on Earth was a young man, stolen from his home at sixteen, able to navigate his way back in a country with no maps or road signs and not much more than local knowledge of place names?

Nettie and he—a sort of perseverance, a persistent understanding. Where would Nettie have found strength for the unremitting concessions of daily life? She was precipitated from delight to lamentation without logical sequence, as though life were too short; she must cram everything in and perhaps sort it out later.

then a castaway in the wide ocean of possibility,

Now Winston Niles Rumfoord and his dog Kazak existed as wave phenomena—apparently

“The Distance of the Moon,” Italo Calvino’