“For hours, for days, for years, she had wandered endlessly within herself but never met anybody, nobody.”

“Had it taken her this long to discover that she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever mentioned it, an immediate sensual connection to people and events, and to her own needs and desires? All these years she had lived in isolation within herself and, strangely, from herself, never wanting or daring to look back.”

“That was what her parents did not understand—and had never understood—about stories. Liza told herself storied as though she was weaving and knotting an endless rope. Then, no matter how dark or terrible the pit she found herself in, she could pull herself out, inch by inch and hand over hand, on the long rope of stories.”

“They say that when you find true love, you know within the first 24 hours. Well with Carol I knew within the first 24 minutes... of the second day that I met her.”

“My mother lost too much and repaired herself in the only way she was able to repair herself. That in fact she is repairing herself, hour by hour.”

“The kings of the old time are dead;The wandering earth herself may beOnly a sudden flaming word,In clanging space a moment heard,Troubling the endless reverie.”