“It was a blessing and also a curse of handwritten letters that unlike email you couldn’t obsessively reread what you’d written after you’d sent it. You couldn’t attempt to un-send it. Once you’d sent it it was gone. It was an object that no longer belonged to you but belonged to your recipient to do with what he would. You tended to remember the feeling of what you’d said more than the words. You gave to object away and left yourself with the memory. That was what it was to give.”

“You could feel things or you could find a way to shut down. But once you were feeling things, you couldn’t decide exactly what to feel. That was the trouble with letting them in at all. They made a mess of the place.”

“Alice suspected Paul couldn’t really picture his father, just like she couldn’t picture Paul when he was away. Maybe that was the case with people you wanted more than was good for you.”

“How could you cleanse yourself if you couldn’t forget?”

“Maybe there is more truth in how you feel than in what actually happens.”

“you remember what is lost, and you forget what's right in front of you.”

“Sometimes you couldn’t face the sadness of being forgotten until you felt the comfort of being remembered again.”