“the book is intended to show how it is possible to live in and be enlarged by loss, even as we continue to experience it.”

“The books which seal off the long perspectives, which sever us from our losses, which represent the world of potency as a world of act, these are the books which, when the drug wears off, go on to the dump with the other empty bottles. Those that continue to interest us move through time to an end, an end we must sense even if we cannot know it; they live in change, until, which is never, as and is are one.”

“She'd not known grief would come in waves, brought on by the smallest of things. Nor had she realized that ordinary acts of living would continue even after the loss of a love and that it would remain possible to get caught up in the moment of a simple pleasure before remembering.”

“Living does mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case, mere possibilities of improvement.”

“Books, by imparting a sense of continuity and context, can enlarge the imagination and enable one to weigh evidence, compare and contrast and make important connections--in short to exercise skepticism.”

“And the point of Rachel the Film should really have been to express how awful and shitty that loss was, that she would have become a person with a long awesome life if she had been allowed to continue living, and that this was just a stupid meaningless loss, a motherfucking loss, a loss loss loss fucking loss, there was no fucking meaning to it, there was nothing that could come out of it...”