“Well, you can't tell it from looking at him....It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.”

“It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.”

“Our friendship was like our writing in some ways. It was the only thing that was interesting about our otherwise dull lives. We were better off when we were together. Together we were a small society of ambition and high ideals. We were tender and patient and kind. We were not like the world at all.”

“Shy Carmen, always hanging back from the others, who knew she could smile? But at the sight of that smile he would have promised her anything. He was just barely awake. Or maybe he was not awake at all. Had he wanted her and not known it? Had he wanted her so much that he dreamed she was lying beside him now? The things our minds keep from us, Gen thought. The secrets we keep even from ourselves.”

“If we put a gun to her head she would sing all day. Try it first with a bird, General Benjamin said gently to Alfredo. Like our soprano, they have no capacity to understand authority. The bird doesn't know enough to be afraid and the person holding the gun will only end up looking like a lunatic.”

“What now is not just a panic-stricken question tossed into a dark unknown. What now can also be our joy. It is a declaration of possibility, of promise, of chance. It acknowledges that our future is open, that we may well do more than anyone expected of us, that at every point in our development we are still striving to grow.”

“Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we've never met, living lives we couldn't possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character's skin.”