“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...”

“Increasing pressure on students to subject themselves to ever more tests, whittling themselves down to rows and rows of tight black integers upon a transcript, all ready to goose-step straig...”

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

“The basic rules of male-female relations were imparted atmospherically in our family, no direct speech allowed.”

“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...”