“(this is before we're living together, before we do the most faithful act of all, mix our separate books into one library)”

“Books mean all possibilities. They mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst and living to your full. They mean everything.”

“Happy is what you realize you are a fraction of a second before it's too late.”

“Outside the leaves on the trees constricted slightly; they were the deep done green of the beginning of autumn. It was a Sunday in September. There would only be four. The clouds were high and the swallows would be here for another month or so before they left for the south before they returned again next summer.”

“We all know our dates of birth but . . . every year there is another date that we pass over without knowing what it is but it is just as important it is the other date the death date.”

“Tonight I can smell the season the way it's usually only possible to at the very first moments of its return, before you're used to it, when you've forgotten its smell, then there it is back in the air and the flow of things shifting and resettling again.”

“Then I saw her smile so close to my eye that there was nothing to see but the smile and the thought came into my head that I’d never been inside a smile before. Who’d have thought being inside a smile would be so ancient and so modern both at once”