"Along the wide curving moat surrounding the palace, rows of cherry trees announced the end of their seasonal beauty. Some of the trees were weeping: blossoms in white and palest pink, ponderous with decreptitude, eddying on the brown water, stirred by the paddling of ducks."
— John Burnham Schwartz (The Commoner: A Novel)

"Thinking about my parents had depressed me. 'I like to think people like us won't make the same bad choices our parents made,' I said.
'And I like to think there aren't any people like us,' Claire replied. 'I guess for my sanity I need to think it. That we're basically blank slates. That the choices we've already made and will end up making--what we do with our lives, what I'm saying to your right this second--that all of it's the story, our original message to ourselves and the world, getting written all the time, again and again, till one day it just covers us like an epitaph...'
She leaned over and kissed me, briefly but fleetingly, on the mouth.
'And then I guess we'll know. Or someone will, Julian, if you and I aren't around anymore. Someone will, if not us. How it all turned out, I mean. What the odds were. How we did.'"
— John Burnham Schwartz (Claire Marvel: A Novel)

"Inaction is not the same thing as patience. It is instead a kind of perpetual waiting room, a sterile holding pen for unlived desire, a negative sanctuary. You wait and wait, but the receptionist is very stern and, somehow, the appointment book always full. To make matters worse, crowded into the adjoining cell like so many desperate immigrants, and separated from you by nothing more than the thin permeable wall of your own fear, are all the anticipated rejections of your life. You would think it might be noisy in there, but you'd be wrong. It is totally silent. There's a small Plexiglas window through which you can study these things, this silence, if you have the inclination and the nerve. And eventually, if you have been a diligent enough student and not wasted your time in dreaming, you come to understand that it is not the rejections that make this a prison, not the defeats, but rather your own grim expectation of defeat; not life but its bodily outline drawn in chalk, where the body should be but isn't, where it once was, this ingrained cowardly pessimism, this relentless betting against love and instinct. This is where the silence comes from."
— John Burnham Schwartz (Claire Marvel: A Novel)