“Fifteen and a half years as incontestable, a continent he'd never visit, a staircase he'd never climb.”

“He checked the barometer he'd nailed to the family room wall: the pressure was rising.”

“Maybe the idea was that he could write so many letters, deliver so many envelopes back to Sandy, eventually he'd have sent all of himself, and could exist more there than he did here.”

“Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.”

“silent desperation of everything they never said - gaps and absences in every conversation, the past circumscribing the present, the future hemming in the past.”

“Between them was fifteen or so feet of frozen space, bounded by his window and hers, but it was as if the windows had liquefied, or else the air had, and his vision skewed and rippled and it was all he could do to put the Newport into gear and ease forward to let the next car in.”

“I used to think...that I had to be careful with how much I lived. As if life was a pocketful of coins. You only got so much and you didn't want to spend it all in one place...But now I know that life is the one thing in the world that never runs out. I might run out of mine, and you might run out of yours, but the world will never run out of life. And we're all very lucky to be part of something like that.”