“You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where can I put it down?”

“I do think I have an ability to record sensual and emotional facts and factoids, to construct a convincing surface of what life feels like, both physical life and emotional life.”

“Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.”

“In England, coffeehouses were dubbed penny-universities, because for the admission price of one cent, a person could sit and be edified all day long by scholars, merchants, travelers, commun...”

“There is nowhere morning does not go.”

“At meals Mama and Papa would observe each other from opposite ends of the long table, and Mama's grey eyes would fly angry silences at Papa, who would catch them in his enormous mustache. Th...”

“Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is to watch the year repeat its days. It is as if I could dip my hand down into time and scoop up blue and green lozenges of April heat a year...”

“I don't know why we stopped reading together, but gradually we were not doing it regularly, and then without realizing it was happening we were reading different books, and gradually we came...”