“She was beautiful; my breath was taken; we were still lonely; she said yes.”

“Hi," she said, in a whispery voice, and nodded as if to confirm that she really meant it.”

“We stood there, squeezing each other's hands as though trying to press through the flesh to the bones and then beyond. She kissed my cheek and neck, and I felt the joy of omnipresent love -- everything around me speaking about me with affection, and Mary was listening.”

“There's a psychological mechanism, I've come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live. It would be unbearably obvious that death is inscribed in everything that constitutes life, that any moment of your existence may be only a breath away from being the last. We would be continuously devastated by the magnitude of that inescapable fact. Still, as we mature into our mortality, we begin to gingerly dip our horror-tingling toes into the void, hoping that our mind will somehow ease itself into dying, that God or some other soothing opiate will remain available as we venture into the darkness of non-being.”

“The end of the world might be near, Isador said to her once, but we don't have to rush to reach it.”

“My dreams were but a means of forgetting, they were the branches tied to the galloping horses of our days, the emptying of the garbage so that tomorrow - assuming there would be a tomorrow - could be filled up with new life. You die, you forget, you wake up knew.”

“It seemed that we loved each other better when there were large swaths of two continents between us. The daily work of love was often hard to perform at home. ”