"You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes."
"What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy's other half."
"There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be."
"Here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. You try to be grateful."
"He says, 'I don't know if I can face this. You know. The party and the ceremony, and then the hour after that, and the hour after that.''You don't have to go to the party. You don't have to go to the ceremony. You don't have to do anything at all.''But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and then you get through that one and then, my god, there's another. I'm so sick."
"She has failed. She wishes she didn't mind. Something, she thinks, is wrong with her."
"Love is deep, a mystery - who wants to understand its every particular?"
"Here, then, is the last moment of true perception, a man fishing in a red jacket and a cloudy sky reflected on opaque water."
"She could, she thinks, have entered a different life. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself."
"There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more."
"She pauses several treads from the bottom, listening, waiting; she is again possessed (it seems to be getting worse) by a dream-like feeling, as if she is standing in the wings, about to go onstage and perform in a play for which she is not appropriately dressed, and for which she has not adequately rehearsed."
"This love of theirs, with its reassuring domesticity and its easy silences, its permanence, has yoked Sally directly to the machinery of mortality itself. Now there is a loss beyond imagining."