“Observing human variety can give pleasure, but so too can human sameness.”

“For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.”

“It was common enough, to see so much death and want a child. Common, therefore human, and he wanted it all the more. When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, a family line, connection.”

“Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.”

“Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion and the beginning of morality”

“And behind all this human movement the ocean bobbed and folded and slid, for nothing could keep still, not people, not water, not time.”

“But it was too interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be in love and say so, and she could only let herself go deeper.”