“Once, a great handful of a girl out west told him - I never did love you. […]How mean of her to salve her spit curled conscience by trying to take away their past! In the kitchen he had started to use those very words on Lou - they sprang readily to mind, as wounding words do - but he stopped himself.”

“Under her high brows, she eyed him straight on and straight across. She had gone to girls' schools, he recalled later. Those girls looked straight at you.”

“How loose he seemed to himself, under the stars! The spaces between the stars were pores, out of which human meaning evaporated.”

“Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.”

“Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.”

“If she[…] had known how much her first half-inch beginning to let go would take - and how long her noticing and renouncing owning and her turning her habits, and beginning the slimmest self-mastery whose end was nowhere in sight - would she have begun?”

“Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you’re alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet’s roundness arc between your feet.”