“All this is just a place, she said. And sometimes such a lonely one.”

“Sometimes there is no darker place than our own thoughts; the moonless midnight of the mind.”

“I would die of lonely.”

“In memory, she lived and moved and laughed, but all that a photograph could offer was one frozen moment of a life.”

“There are silences and silences. No one of them is like another. There is the silence of grief in velvet-draped rooms of a plushly carpeted funeral parlor which is far different from the bleak and terrible silence of grief in a widower's lonely bedroom.”

“No one can genuinely love the world, which is too large to love entire. To love all the world at once is...dangerous self-delusion. Loving the world is like loving the idea of love, which is perilous because, feeling virtuous about this grand affection, you are freed from the struggles and the duties that come with loving people as individuals, with loving one place-home-above all others.I embrace the world on a scale that allows genuine love-the small places like a town, a neighborhood, a street-and I love life, because of what the beauty of this world and of this life portend.”

“For some, the past is a chain, each day a link, raveling backward to one ringbolt or another, in one dark place or another, and tomorrow is a slave to yesterday.”