She was not a person who froze someone’s character in her mind, calling this one egotistical and that one not nearly confident enough and another one… - Kathleen Winter

…People are rivers, always ready to move from one state of being into another. It is not fair, to treat people as if they are finished beings. Everyone is always becoming and unbecoming.

It was not fair, she felt, to treat people as if they were finished beings. Everyone was always becoming and unbecoming.

He had to remind himself that the work of a surgeon is poetry of a kind, in which blood is the meaning and flesh is the text.

Wally Michelin had stomped through kindergarten and grades one and two with a certainty Wayne found fascinating . . . Wayne was in love with her from the moment he heard her crumbly voice. So in love he wished he could become her. If there was a way he could make himself into a ghost without a body - a shadow - or transparent like the lures his father used to catch Arctic char, he would have done it. He would have transformed into his father’s lure, slipped under Wally Michelin’s divinely freckled skin, and lived inside her, looking through her eyes.

He wanted to throw the pills away and wait and see what would happen to his body. How much of his body image was accurate and how much was a construct he had come to believe? He tried to see his body objectively.