“Two kinds of people always lie about their ages: actresses and Latin American pitchers.”

“Alarmingly, though, on top of the bookcase there is also a family portrait of Bea with two just-as-striking blond-and-blue-eyed sisters and a pair of handsome proud Nordic parents, whose stares make me aware of the vast age difference between Bea and me, and I am profoundly ashamed to be here buying drugs in this girl's apartment. What I'd really like to do, I think, is lie down on this couch and take a nap.”

“His life was two lives now: the life he would have and the life he would forever wonder about.”

“In the kitchen Valeria was making breakfast, his aunt never made breakfast even though Carlo insisted for years that a hotel hoping to cater to French and Americans must offer breakfast. “It’s a lazy man’s meal.", she always said. "What laggard expects to eat before doing any work?”

“Maybe every couple lived in the gaps between conversations, unable to say the important things for fear they had already been said, or couldn't be said; maybe every relationship started over every time two people came together.”

“erhaps it was the difference in age between the countries—America with its expansive youth, building all those drive-in movie theaters and cowboy restaurants; Italians living in endless contraction, in the artifacts of generations, in the bones of empires.”

“What kind of wife would I be if I left your father simply because he was dead?”