“Years from now I'll look back and remember today as the day I met him. I'll look back and remember the exact moment my life began to include him. I will remember it forever.”
“I thought I'd had another few decades before my noise complaint years.”
“No one measures a life in weeks and days. You measure life in years and by the things that happen to you.”
“I began to measure things in absence instead of presence.”
“It happened, as many things do, imperceptibly, in many ways at once. I date it - the slow crumbling of my faith, the pulverization of my fortress - from the time, about a year after I had begun to preach, when I began to read again. I justified this desire by the fact that I was still in school, and I began, fatally, with Dostoyevsky.”