“With a certain frustration I knew I spoke too soon, too urgently. I wanted to get out of the way the things I knew to say, wanted to say, the things I'd been thinking, all in the hope of moving into the unforeseen.”

“I know I chatter on far too much... but if you only knew how many things I want to say and don't. Give me SOME credit.”

“No, it can't," I say. "It's— it's the kind of thing you want to say, that you want to believe, but it isn't— I know isn't true. I thought my heart knew things, but what I thought was real turned out to be a lie, and now I don't—”

“He had things he wanted to tell me too; I knew by the way his breath hung in the air before us.”

“I can't help it, Alexis," he said "I want to make you think too much...and then I want to hear the things you've been thinking too much.”

“But Jude,' she would say, 'you knew me. All those days and years, Jude, you knew me. My ways and my hands and how my stomach folded and how we tried to get Mickey to nurse and how about that time when the landlord said...but you said...and I cried, Jude. You knew me and had listened to the things I said in the night, and heard me in the bathroom and laughed at my raggedy girdle and I laughed too because I knew you too, Jude. So how could you leave me when you knew me?”