“Jenny looked, as usual, elegant and as fine-drawn as a young doe, but oddly muted, as if she had been outlined in sepia.”

“...bathed in the thick honey gold of the sun through encircling trees only just beginning to turn the muted metal colors of fall.”

“All places where the French settled have corruption at their heart, a kind of soft, rotten glow, like the phosphorescence of decaying wood, that is oddly attractive.”

“Forsythia that I thought had been dozed into oblivion sprang up and misted the foundations with lemon icing I yearn for all winter.”

“The very old can tell you about peace. They have fought through the black, sinking, visceral knowledge of death–their own death–that heralds middle age and come to the place where childhood meets them once more, and with it that ineffable treasure that only the very young and old know: the tranquility of the moment. The contentment of living each day as it comes to them, wholly and with all senses. The young do it because they know nothing, yet, of pain and fear and the transience of their lives; the old because they know everything of those things and can bear them only by staying in the moment. Carpe diem> may be the sum of all the world's wisdom. I have always thought Horace must have been old when he wrote it.”

“Fireflies winked, and the darkening bay breathed and sighed like a great dolphin and the thin pure curve of a young moon hung in the green sky...”

“All over Atlanta that fall, in the blue twilights, girls came clicking home from their jobs in their clunky heels and miniskirts and opened their apartment windows to the winesap air, and got out ice cubes, and put on Petula Clark singing 'Downtown', and sat down to wait. Soon the young men would come, drifting out of their bachelor apartments in Bermuda shorts and Topsiders, carrying beers and gin and tonics, looking for a refill and a a date and the keeping of promises that hung in the bronze air like fruit on the eve of ripeness.”