The Glass Hotel: A novel

feel the old quickening that’s always come over me when a beautiful shot is somewhere near. I

watching the first pale flowers push through dark earth in the springtime,

“Keep in touch,” he said to Walter, and the men shook hands with the mutual understanding that they’d never speak again.

of just having been subtly insulted in an obscure way that would take too much energy to parse, and as always he couldn’t tell whether the insult was real or just a typically Canadian case of postcolonial insecurity.

It turned out that never having that conversation with Vincent meant that he was somehow condemned to always have that conversation with Vincent.

he imagined the confrontation so many times that it began to seem like something that might actually have happened.

Leon flipped through the books and shook them over the bed. Nothing fell out. Leon wasn’t really sure what he was looking for. Incriminating letters from Bell? Threatening marginalia?

medical misfortune sends you into the country of the sick—which has its own rituals, customs, traditions, and rules—then

companies are like nation-states. They all have their own cultures.”