Cider House Rules Quotes

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

Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.

People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.

When time passes, it's the people who knew you whom you want to see; they're the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what's it matter what they did to you?

… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.

It´s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can't interfere with people you love any more than you're supposed to interfere with people you don't even know. And that's hard, ..., because you often feel like interfering -you want to be the one who makes the plans.

Being afraid you'll look like a coward is the worst reason for doing anything.

How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.

Being wrong about important things is exhausting.

It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.

I think about you more and more, but I don't waste my time - or yours - thinking about who you were before I knew you.

If pride is a sin ... moral pride is the greatest sin.

He had heard her say, so many times, that a society that approved of making abortion illegal was a society that approved of violence against women; that making abortion illegal was simply a sanctimonious, self-righteous form of violence against women- it was just another way of legalizing violence against women, Nurse Caroline would say.

…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.

These same people who tell us we must defend the lives of the unborn-they are the same people who seem not so interested in defending anyone but themselves after the accident of birth is complete! These same people who profess their love of the unborn's soul-they don't care to make much of a contribution to the poor, they don't care to offer much assistance to the unwanted or the oppressed! How do they justify such a concern for the fetus and such a lack of concern for unwanted and abused children? They condemn others for the accident of conception; they condemn the poor-as if the poor can help being poor. One way the poor could help themselves would be to be in control of the size of their families. I thought that freedom of choice was obviously democratic-was obviously American!

Here is the trap you are in.... And it's not my trap—I haven't trapped you. Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you—because you know how to perform them—have no choice, either. What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too. If abortion was legal, a woman would have a choice—and so would you. You could feel free not to do it because someone else would. But the way it is, you're trapped. Women are trapped. Women are victims, and so are you.

Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.

Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.

If I had to be anything," he told her, "I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.

It's natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you can't interfere with people you love anymore than you're supposed to interfere with people you don't even know.

It's because even a good man can't always be right, that we need ... rules.

My brain is sending poison to my heart.

He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.

Is it a democratic society that condemns people to the accident of conception? What are we-monkeys? If you expect people to be responsible for their children, you have to give them the right to choose whether or not to have children. What are you people thinking of? You're not only crazy! You're ogres!

And the thing about love," Wally said to Angel, "is that you can’t force anyone. It’s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can’t interfere with people you love any more than you’re supposed interfere with people you don’t even know. And that’s hard,” he added, “because you often feel like interfering - you want to be the one who makes the plans. “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.

Love was certainly not safe - not ever.

Grant us safe lodging, and holy rest,” Mrs. Grogan was saying, “and peace at last.” Amen, thought Wilbur Larch, the Saint of St. Cloud’s, who was seventy-something, and an ether addict, and who felt that he’d come a long way and still had a long way to go.

No one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen...You shouldn't have a baby if there's no one who wants to feel it kick or listen to it move.

Men who believe in good and evil, and who believe that good should win, should watch for those moments when it is possible to play God

The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face; he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.

Wherever Melony went, she would not be without guidance, she would not be without love, without faith; she had a good book with her. If only she kept reading it and reading it...

Here in St. Cloud’s,” Dr. Larch wrote, “ I have been given the choice of playing God or leaving practically everything up to chance. It is my experience that practically everything is left up to chance much of the time; men who believe in good and evil, and who believe that good should win, should watch for those moments when it is possible to play God – we should seize those moments. There won’t be may

… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign; it is at least a form of being human.

Did anyone who was in love and was unsatisfied with how he was loved in return ever feel saved?

He wanted to take Homer Wells in his arms, and hug him, and kiss him, but he could only hope that Homer understood how much Dr. Larch's self-esteem was dependent on his self-control.

May God watch over your soul, which no man may abuse.

I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.’ (David Copperfield) “But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were not gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect—and their meaning was unknown—but they were there.

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.

The chairman of the state board of medical examiners was a retired physician who thought that President Teddy Roosevelt was the only other man in the world besides himself who had not been made from a banana.

What is this fascination the world has with death?

...it was a feeling with nowhere to go. Was that what love was, and how it came to you--leaving you no options for its use?

Every time you throw a snail off the dock," Ray teased Homer Wells, "you're making someone start his whole life over." "Maybe I'm doing him a favor," said Homer Wells, the orphan.

Almost none of them understood Great Expectations or David Copperfield, anyway. They were not only too young for the Dickensian language, they were also too young to comprehend the usual language of St. Cloud’s. What mattered to Dr. Larch was the idea of reading aloud – it was a successful soporific for the children who didn’t know what they were listening to, and for those few who understood the words and the story, then the evening reading provided them with a way to leave St. Cloud’s in their dreams, in their imaginations. Dickens was a personal favorite of Dr. Larch; it was no accident, of course, that both Great Expectations and David Copperfield were concerned with orphans. (‘What in the hell else would you read to an orphan?’ Dr. Larch inquired in his journal.)

You are my work of art," Wilbur Larch told Homer Wells. "Everything else has just been a job. I don't know if you've got a work of art in you," Larch concluded in his letter to Homer, "but I know what your job is,and you know what it is, too.

Dr. Larch bent over him and kissed him, very lightly, on his lips. Homer heard Dr. Larch whisper, ‘Good work, Homer.’ He felt a second, even lighter kiss. ‘Good work, my boy,’ the doctor said, and then left him. Homer Wells felt his tears come silently; there were more tears than he remembered crying the last time he had cried – when Fuzzy Stone had died and Homer had lied about Fuzzy to Snowy Meadows and the others. He cried and cried, but he never made a sound; he would have to change Dr. Larch’s pillowcase in the morning, he cried so much. He cried because he had received his first fatherly kisses.

And so this added consideration - that she never get pregnant - contributed to the moderation of their coupling, which was almost always managed under conditions harsh enough to win the approval of New England's founding fathers

And what were the rules at St. Cloud's? What were Larch's rules? Which rules did Dr. Larch observe, which ones did he break, or replace--and with what confidence?

You can’t protect people, kiddo,” Wally said. “All you can do is love them.

This mannerism of what he'd seen of society struck Homer Wells quite forcefully; people, even nice people—because, surely, Wally was nice—would say a host of critical things about someone to whom they would then be perfectly pleasant. At. St. Cloud's, criticism was plainer—and harder, if not impossible, to conceal.

Your disapproval is noted. It is legitimate. You are welcome to disapprove. But you are not welcome to be ignorant, to look the other way, to be unable to perform—should you change your mind.

On his bedside table, between the reading lamp and the telephone, was his battered copy of David Copperfield. Homer didn't have to open the book to know how the story began. "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show," he recited from memory.

I think you’re being selfish.” “What do you mean, selfish?” Wally asked. “A war is for your country, it’s serving your country!” “To you, it’s an adventure,” Candy said. “That’s what’s selfish about it.

Homer Wells was in Wally’s room, reading David Copperfield and thinking about Heaven – ‘…that sky above me, where, in the mystery to come, I might yet love her with a love unknown on earth, and tell her what the strife had been within me when I loved her here.’ I think I would prefer to love Candy here, ‘on earth,’ Homer Wells was thinking – when Olive interrupted them.

These Princes of Maine, these Kings of New England, these orphans of Saint Cloud's - whoever they were, they were the heroes of their own lives. That much Homer could see in the darkness, that much Dr. Larch, like a father, gave him.

Wallace Worthington would have reminded Wilbur Larch of someone he might have met at the Channing-Peabodys’, where Dr. Larch went to perform his second abortion – the rich people’s abortion, as Larch thought of it. Wallace Worthington would strike Homer Wells as what a real King of New England should look like.

That was when Angel Wells became a fiction writer, whether he knew it or not. That's when he learned how to make the make-believe matter to him more than real life mattered to him; that's when he learned how to paint a picture that was not real and never would be real, but in order to be believed at all- even on a sunny Indian summer day- it had to be better made and seem more real than real; it had to sound at least possible.

Dr. Gingrich, who was increasingly fascinated with the leaps of Mrs. Goodhall’s mind, was still marveling over the confusing image of a nonpracticing homosexual; it struck him as a brilliant accusation to make of anyone who was slightly (or hugely) different.

Homer Wells, listening to Big Dot Taft, felt like her voice – dulled. Wally was away, Candy was away, and the anatomy of a rabbit was, after Clara, no challenge; the migrants, whom he’d so eagerly anticipated, were just plain hard workers; life was just a job. He had grown up without noticing when? Was there nothing remarkable in the transition?

The Winkles appeared to greet the morning vigorously. Although Homer had never heard human beings make love, or moose mate, he knew perfectly well that the Winkles were mating. If Dr. Larch had been present, he might have drawn new conclusions concerning the Winkles' inability to produce offspring. He would have concluded that the violent athleticism of their coupling simply destroyed, or scared to death, every available egg and sperm.

He might have told Homer, then, that he loved him very much and that he needed something very active to occupy himself at this moment of Homer's departure.

In other parts of the world, they have double-bed sheets,” wrote Wilbur Larch in A Brief History of St. Cloud’s. “Here in St. Cloud’s we do without—we just do without.

Sometimes, when we are labeled, when we are branded, our brand becomes our calling;

It won't take much of a city to be a city for me

She say to tell you you was the nicest," Muddy told the boy. "She say to tell your dad he a hero, and that you was the nicest.

It was in looking at sea gulls that it first occurred to Homer Wells that he was free.

Homer and Candy passed by the empty and brightly lit dispensary; they peeked into Nurse Angela’s empty office. Homer knew better than to peek into the delivery room when the light was on. From the dormitory, they could hear Dr. Larch’s reading voice. Although Candy held tightly to his hand, Homer was inclined to hurry – in order not to miss the bedtime story.

...wherever Melony went, she would not be without guidance, she would not be without love, without faith; she had a good book with her. If only she'll keep reading it, and reading it

it struck him as a brilliant accusation to make of anyone who was slightly (or hugely) different. It was the best rumor to start about anyone because it could never be proved or disproved.

He hadn’t known many British, but some of them seemed crazy to him, and so it seemed a small thing to agree to—and Wally thought it was wise to agree with whoever it was who held the catheter.

At times, he admitted, he had been very happy in the apple business. He knew what Larch would have told him: that his happiness was not the point, or that it wasn't as important as his usefulness.

When Homer Wells saw the stationmaster’s brain stem exposed, he felt that Dr. Larch was busy enough – with both hands – for it to be safe to say what Homer wanted to say. ‘I love you,’ said Homer Wells. He knew he had to leave the room, then – while he could still see the door – and so he started to leave. ‘I love you too, Homer,’ said Wilbur Larch, who for another minute or more could not have seen a blood clot in the brain stem if there had been one to see. He heard Homer say ‘Right’ before he heard the door close. In a while, he could make out the brain stem clearly, there was no clot. ‘Arrhythmia,’ Wilbur Larch repeated to himself. Then he added, ‘Right,’ as if he were now speaking for Homer Wells. Dr. Larch put his instruments aside; he gripped the operating table for a long time.

Wilbur Larch knew that freedom was an orphan’s most dangerous illusion, and when he finally heard from Homer, he scanned the oddly formal letter, which was disappointing in its lack of detail. Regarding illusions, and all the rest, there was simply no evidence. ‘I am learning to swim,’ wrote Homer Wells. (I know! I know! Tell me about it! Thought Wilbur Larch.) ‘I do better at driving,’ Homer added.

You remember how I used to tell you that I was Doctor Larch's helper?" Homer asked Angel. "Right," said Angel Wells. "Well, I got very good--at helping him," Homer said. "Very good. I'm not an amateur

He felt like hearing Mrs. Grogan’s prayer again, and so he went to the girls’ division a little early for his usual delivery of Jane Eyre. He eavesdropped in the hall on Mrs. Grogan’s prayer; I must ask her if she’d mind saying it to the boys, he thought, then wondered if it would confuse the boys coming so quickly on the heels of, or just before, the Princes of Maine, Kings of New England benediction. I get confused myself sometimes, Dr. Larch knew. ‘Grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest,’ Mrs. Grogan was saying, ‘and peace at the last.’ Amen, thought Wilbur Larch, the saint of St. Cloud’s, who was seventy-something, and an ether addict, and who felt that he’d come a long way and still had a long way to go.

It had been a startling day for young Copperfield: most of the morning confined in an enema-bag carton; his first attempt at flight; his long fall through the weeds; and then sitting on that dead man’s face.

Candy took the bathing suit from her and used the suit to wipe the tears from Rose Rose's face. "You're fine, you're just fine," Candy said to the girl. "And you're going to feel better. No one's going to hurt you.

It’s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can’t interfere with people you love any more than you’re supposed to interfere with people you don’t even know. And that’s hard. Because you often feel like interfering—you want to be the one who makes the plans. . . You can’t protect people, kiddo, all you can do is love them.

Homer Wells non si sentiva in salvo. Chi mai, innamorato e insoddisfatto per come il suo amore è ricambiato, chi mai si sente in salvo? Al contrario, Homer Wells si sentiva preso di mira e perseguitato in modo speciale.

A man named Hero washed the press cloths; Meany Hyde told Homer that the man had been a kind of hero, once. ‘That’s all I heard. He’s been comin’ here for years, but he was a hero. Just once,’ Meany added, as if there might be more shame attached to the rarity of the man’s heroism than there was glory to be sung for his moment in the sun.

He was an obstetrician; he delivered babies into the world. His colleagues called this 'the Lord's work.' And he was an abortionist; he delivered mothers, too. His colleagues called this 'the Devil's work,' but it was all the Lord's work to Wilbur Larch. As Mrs. Maxwell had observed: 'The true physician's soul cannot be too broad and gentle.

What a new sense of security Homer had felt in that moment of laughter with friends in the enclosed dark of the moving car, and what a sense of freedom the car itself gave to him—its seemingly effortless journeying was a wonder to Homer Wells, for whom the idea of motion (not to mention the sense of change) was accomplished only rarely and only with enormous strife.

It was Nurse Caroline who introduced Homer to young Dr. Harlow, who was in the throes of growing out his bangs; a cowlick persisted in making his forehead look meager; a floppy shelf of straw-colored hair gave Dr. Harlow’s eyes the constant anxiousness of someone peering from under the brim of a hat. ‘Oh yes, Wells – our ether expert,’ Dr. Harlow said snidely. ‘I grew up in an orphanage,’ said Homer Wells. ‘I did a lot of helping out around the hospital.’ ‘But surely you never administered any ether?’ said Dr. Harlow. ‘Surely not,’ lied Homer Wells. As Dr. Larch had discovered with the board of trustees, it was especially gratifying to lie to unlikable people.

The situation Larch was thinking of was war, the so-called war in Europe; Larch, and many others, feared that the war wouldn’t stay there. (‘I’m sorry, Homer,’ Larch imagined having to tell the boy. ‘I don’t want you to worry, but you have a bad heart; it just wouldn’t stand up to a war.’) What Larch meant was that his own heart would never stand up to Homer Wells’s going to war. The love of Wilbur Larch for Homer Wells extended even to his tampering with history, a field wherein he was an admitted amateur, but it was nonetheless a field that he respected and also loved. (In an earlier entry in the file on Homer Wells – an entry that Dr. Larch removed, for it lent an incorrect tone of voice, or at least a tone of voice unusual for history – Dr. Larch had written: ‘I love nothing or no one as much as I love Homer Wells. Period.

Melony put herself straight to bed without her dinner. Mrs. Grogan, worried about her, went to Melony’s bed and felt her forehead, which was feverish, but Mrs. Grogan could not coax Melony to drink anything. All Melony said was, ‘He broke his promise.’ Later, she said, ‘Homer Wells has left St. Cloud’s.’ ‘You have a little temperature, dear,’ said Mrs. Grogan, but when Homer Wells didn’t come to read Jane Eyre aloud that evening, Mrs. Grogan started paying closer attention. She allowed Melony to read to the girls that evening; Melony’s voice was oddly flat and passionless. Melony’s reading from Jane Eyre depressed Mrs. Grogan – especially when she read this part: …it is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it… Why, the girl didn’t bat an eye! Mrs. Grogan observed.

Dr. Larch pointed out that Melony had taken Jane Eyre with her; he accepted this as a hopeful sign—wherever Melony went, she would not be without guidance, she would not be without love, without faith; she had a good book with her. If only she’ll keep reading it, and reading it, Larch thought.

For Homer Wells, it was different. He did not imagine leaving St. Cloud's. The Princes of Maine that Homer saw, the Kings of New England that he imagined — they reigned at the court of St. Cloud's, they traveled nowhere; they didn't get to go to sea; they never even saw the ocean. But somehow, even to Homer Wells, Dr. Larch's benediction was uplifting, full of hope. These Princes of Maine, these Kings of New England, these orphans of St. Cloud's — whoever they were, they were the heroes of their own lives. That much Homer could see in the darkness; that much Dr. Larch, like a father, gave him.

Again, Homer felt the nudge in his ribs, and Mr. Rose said, mildly, ‘You all so uneducated – Homer’s havin’ a little fun with you.’ When the bottle of rum passed from man to man, Mr. Rose just passed it along. ‘Don’t the name Homer mean nothin’ to you?’ Mr. Rose asked the men. ‘I think I heard of it,’ the cook Black Pan said. ‘Homer was the world’s first storyteller!’ Mr. Rose announced. The nudge at Homer’s ribs was back, and Mr. Rose said, ‘Our Homer knows a good story, too.

Dr. Gingrich and Mrs. Goodhall had prevailed upon the board of trustees; the board had requested that Larch comply with Dr. Gingrich’s recommendation of a ‘follow-up report’ on the status of each orphan’s success (or failure) in each foster home. If this added paperwork was too tedious for Dr. Larch, the board recommended that Larch take Mrs. Goodhall’s suggestion and accept an administrative assistant. Don’t I have enough history to attend to, as is? Larch wondered. He rested in the dispensary; he sniffed a little ether and composed himself. Gingrich and Goodhall, he said to himself. Ginghall and Goodrich, he muttered. Richhall and Ginggood! Goodring and Hallrich! He woke himself, giggling. ‘What are you so merry about?’ Nurse Angela said sharply to him from the hall outside the dispensary. ‘Goodballs and Ding Dong!’ Wilbur Larch said to her.

The Winkles were in the business of manufacturing sensations for people who were so removed from any sensations of their own making or circumstances that only high (but simulated) adventure could provoke response from them at all. Dr. Larch was not impressed with the Winkles' "business"; he knew they were simply rich people who did exactly what they wanted to do and needed to call what they did something more serious-sounding than play. What impressed Larch with the Winkles was that they were deliriously happy.

He felt the pregnant woman squeeze his hand so hard that it hurt. The word ‘Mother!’ was strangely on his lips when Nurse Angela finally got the door open and seized Homer Wells in her arms. ‘Oh, oh!’ she cried. ‘Oh Homer – my Homer, our Homer! I knew you’d be back!’ And because the pregnant woman’s hand still firmly held Homer’s hand – neither one of them felt able to let go – Nurse Angela turned and included the woman in her embrace. It seemed to Nurse Angela that this pregnant woman was just another orphan who belonged (like Homer Wells) exactly where she was.

Candy felt helpless; no one seemed to understand why she was standing there. Children were colliding with her at hip level, and this awkward, darkly handsome young man, who was surely her own age but seemed somehow older…was she supposed to tell him why she’d come to St. Cloud’s? Couldn’t anyone tell by just looking at her? Then Homer Wells looked at her in that way; their eyes met. Candy thought that he had seen her many times before, that he’d watched her grow up, had seen her naked, had even observed the act responsible for the particular trouble she was now presenting for cure. It was shattering to Homer to recognize in the expression of the beautiful stranger he had fallen in love with something as familiar and pitiable as another unwanted pregnancy.

Once the state starts providing, it feels free to hand out the rules, too!" Larch blurted hastily. ..."In a better world..." she began patiently. "No, not in a better world!" he cried. "In this one--in this world. I take this world as a given. Talk to me about this world!" ... "Oh, I can't always be right," Larch said tiredly. "Yes, I know," Nurse Caroline said sympathetically. "It's because even a good man can't always be right that we need a society, that we need certain rules--call them priorities, if you prefer," she said. ... Always in the background of his mind, there was a newborn baby crying... And they were not crying to be born, he knew; they were crying because they were born.

And the thing about being in love,” Wally said to Angel, “is that you can’t force anyone. It’s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can’t interfere with people you love any more than you’re supposed to interfere with people you don’t even know. And that’s hard,” he added, “because you often feel like interfering—you want to be the one who makes the plans.

They were members of Maine’s very small money class. Their business, as they ridiculously called it, didn’t make a cent, but they didn’t need to make money; they were born rich. Their needless enterprise consisted of taking people to the wilderness and creating for them the sensation that they were lost there; they also took people shooting down rapids in frail rafts or canoes, creating for them the sensation that they would surely be bashed to death before they drowned.

When he and Wally stopped laughing, Homer said, ‘I’ve never seen the ocean, you know.’ ‘Candy, did you hear that?’ Wally asked, but Candy had released herself with her brief laughter and she was sound asleep. ‘You’ve never seen the ocean?’ Wally asked Homer. ‘That’s right,’ said Homer Wells. ‘That’s not funny,’ said Wally seriously. ‘Right,’ Homer said. A little later, Wally said, ‘You want to drive for a while?’ ‘I don’t know how to drive,’ Homer said. ‘Really?’ Wally asked. And later still – it was almost midnight – Wally asked, ‘Uh, have you ever been with a girl – made love to one, you know?’ But Homer Wells had also felt released: he had laughed out loud with his new friends. The young but veteran insomniac had fallen asleep. Would Wally have been surprised to know that Homer hadn’t laughed out loud with friends before, either?

But first, he knew he had to apologize for hurting Dr. Larch’s feelings – it had all just slipped out of him, and it made him almost cry to think that he had cause Dr. Larch any suffering. He went straight across the hall to the dispensary, where he could see what he thought were Dr. Larch’s feet extending off the foot of the dispensary bed; the dispensary medicine cabinets blocked the rest of the bed from view. He spoke to Dr. Larch’s feet, which to Homer’s surprise were larger than he remembered them; he was also surprised that Dr. Larch – a neat man – had left his shows on and that his shoes were muddy. ‘Doctor Larch?’ Homer said. ‘I’m sorry.’ When there was no response, Homer thought crossly to himself that Dr. Larch was under an unusually ill-timed ether sedation. ‘I’m sorry, and I love you,’ Homer added, a little louder. He held his breath, listening for Larch’s breathing, which he couldn’t hear; alarmed, he stepped around the cabinets and saw the lifeless stationmaster stretched out on Larch’s bed. It did not occur to Homer that this had been the first time someone had said ‘I love you’ to the stationmaster.

In Wally’s bedroom Homer marveled at how the world was simultaneously being invented and destroyed. Nothing marvelous about that, Dr. Larch would have assured him. At St. Cloud’s, except for the irritation about sugar stamps and other aspects of the rationing, very little was changed by the war. (Or by what people once singled out as the Depression, thought Wilbur Larch.) We are an orphanage; we provide these services; we stay the same – if we’re allowed to stay the same, he thought. When he would almost despair, when the ether was too overpowering, when his own age seemed like the last obstacle and the vulnerability of his illegal enterprise was as apparent to him as the silhouettes of the fir trees against the sharp night skies of autumn, Wilbur Larch would save himself with this one thought: I love Homer Wells, and I have saved him from the war.

When an orphan is depressed," wrote Wilbur Larch, "he is attracted to telling lies. A lie is at least a vigorous enterprise, it keeps you on your toes by making you suddenly responsible for what happens because of it. You must be alert to lie, and stay alert to keep your lie a secret. Orphans are not the masters of their fates; they are the last to believe you if you tell them that other people are also not in charge of theirs. When you lie, it makes you feel in charge of your life. Telling lies is very seductive to orphans. I know," Dr. Larch wrote. "I know because I tell them, too. I love to lie. When you lie, you feel as if you have cheated fate--your own, and everybody else's.

David Copperfield had a fever when he’d gone to bed, and Larch went to check on the boy. Dr. Larch was relieved to feel that young Copperfield’s fever had broken; the boy’s forehead was cool, and a slight sweat chilled the boy’s neck, which Larch carefully rubbed dry with a towel. There was not much moonlight; therefore, Larch felt unobserved. He bent over Copperfield and kissed him, much in the manner that he remembered kissing Homer Wells. Larch moved on to the next bed and kissed Smokey Fields, who tasted vaguely like hot dogs; yet the experience was soothing to Larch. How he wished he had kissed Homer more, when he’d had the chance! He went from bed to bed, kissing the boys; it occurred to him, he didn’t know all their names, but he kissed them anyway. He kissed all of them. When he left the room, Smokey Fields asked the darkness, ‘What was that all about?’ But no one else was awake, or else no one wanted to answer him. I wish he would kiss me like that, thought Nurse Edna, who had a very alert ear for unusual goings-on. ‘I think it’s nice,’ Mrs. Grogan said to Nurse Angela, when Nurse Angela told her about it. ‘I think it’s senile,’ Nurse Angela said. But Homer Wells, at Wally’s window, did not know that Dr. Larch’s kisses were out in the world, in search of him. He didn’t know, either – he could never have imagined it! – that Candy was also awake, and also worried. If he does stay, if he doesn’t go back to St. Cloud’s, she was thinking, what will I do? The sea tugged all around her. Both the darkness and the moon were failing.

That was the night he got up and went to the boys' division; perhaps he was looking for his history in the big room where all the boys slept, but what he found instead was Dr. Larch kissing every boy a late good night. Homer imagined then that Dr. Larch had kissed him like that, when he'd been small; Homer could not have imagined how those kisses, even now, were still kisses meant for him. They were kisses seeking Homer Wells. That was the same night that he saw the lynx on the barren, unplanted hillside—glazed with snow that had thawed and then refrozen into a thick crust. Homer had stepped outside for just a minute; after witnessing the kisses, he desired the bracing air. It was a Canada lynx—a dark, gunmetal gray against the lighter gray of the moonlit snow, its wildcat stench so strong Homer gagged to srnell the thing. Its wildcat sense was keen enough to keep it treading within a single leap's distance of the safety of the woods. The lynx was crossing the brow of the hill when it began to slide; its claws couldn't grip the crust of the snow, and the hill had suddenly grown steeper. The cat moved from the dull moonlight into the sharper light from Nurse Angela's office window; it could not help its sideways descent. It traveled closer to the orphanage than it would ever have chosen to come, its ferocious death smell clashing with the freezing cold. The lynx's helplessness on the ice had rendered its expression both terrified; and resigned; both madness and fatalism were caught in the cat's fierce, yellow eyes and in its involuntary, spitting cough as it slid on, actually bumping against the hospital before its claws could find a purchase on the crusted snow. It spit its rage at Homer Wells, as if Homer had caused its unwilling descent. Its breath had frozen on its chin whiskers and its tufted ears were beaded with ice. The panicked animal tried to dash up the hill; it was less than halfway up when it began to slide down again, drawn toward the orphanage against its will. When it set out from the bottom of the hill a second time, the lynx was panting; it ran diagonally uphill, slipping but catching itself, and slipping again, finally escaping into the softer snow in the woods— nowhere near where it had meant to go; yet the lynx would accept any route of escape from the dark hospital. Homer Wells, staring into the woods after the departed lynx, did not imagine that he would ever leave St. Cloud's more easily.