Crow Lake by Mary Lawson, r. Dec. 2014

p. 6 …children have very little concept of time. Tomorrow is forever, and years pass in no time at all.

p. 20 And then, back in February, I found a letter from Matt waiting for me when I got home from work on Friday evening. I saw the writing and instantly I saw Matt - you know how handwriting conjures up the person.

p. 144 It was getting dark, and the cold was creeping in with the night. Matt told me that cold was just the absence of heat, but it didn't feel like that. It felt like a presence. It felt stealthy, like a thief. You had to wrap your clothes tight around you or it would steal your warmth, and when all your warmth was gone you'd just be a shell, empty and brittle as a dead beetle.

p. 196 The research I love. It calls for patience, precision, and a methodical approach, and all of those I have. That makes it sound dull, but it is far from full. On a pure level, it allows you to feel that you have added your own tiny piece to the jigsaw of scientific knowledge.

p. 241 Things change. Everyone has to grow up. But not grow apart, as we had done, surely?

p. 243 Daniel remarked… that [the backwoods of northern Ontario] seemed an unlikely environment to have produced an academic. That irritated me. Surely the most unlikely place to produce an academic is a city, with its noise and confusion and lack of time for thought or contemplation?

p. 259 That last stretch of the journey from Toronto to Crow Lake always takes me by the throat. Partly it's the familiarity; I know every tree, every rock, every boggy bit of marshland so well, that even though I almost always arrive after dark I can feel them around me, lying there in the darkness as if they were my own bones. Partly, too, it is the sensation of going back in time, moving from "now" to "then," and the recognition that wherever you are now and wherever you may be in the future, nothing alters the point you started from.