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By John Irving

'Wet shoes,' the professor once said to Homer, 'are a fact of Maine. They are a given. Your method, Homer, of putting wet shoes on a windowsill where they might be dried by the faint appearance, albeit rare, of the Maine sun, is admirable for its positivism, its determined optism. However,' the professor would go on, 'a method I would recommend for wet shoes -- a method, I must add, that is independent of the weather -- involves a more reliable source of heat in Maine: namely, the funace. When you consider that the days when shoes get wet are days, as a rule, when we don't see the sun, you'll recognize the furnace-room method as having certain advantages.'

The wide-open jacket of the boy made Homer remember Clara and how a scalpel made no mistakes. Only a hand makes mistakes. His chest was cold, and he was driving too fast.

Are there things you can't ease into? wondered Homer Wells. The scalpel, he remembered, has a certain heft; one does not need to press on it - it seems to cut on its own - but one does need to take charge of it in a certain way. When one takes it up, one has to move it. A scalpel does not require the authority of force, but it demands of the user the authority of motion.

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us are wrapped up in parentheses.

'Whatever the alternative is -- if there is one -- it isn't prayer,' he said.

When there was another night pressing, Angel sat with Rose Rose on the cider house roof and told her all about the ocean: the strange tiredness one feels at the edge of the sea, the weight in the air, the haze in the middle of a summer day, the way the surf softens sharp things. He told her the whole, familiar story. How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.

'It's hard to want to protect someone else, and not be able to,' Angel pointed out. 'You can't protect people, kiddo,' Wally said. 'All you can do is love them.'

To Nurse Edna, who was in love, and to Nurse Angela, who wasn't (but who had in her wisdom named both Homer Wells and Fuzzy Stone), there was no fault to be found in the hearts of either Dr. Stone or Dr. Larch, who were -- if there ever were -- Princes of Maine, Kings of New England.