“Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade.”

“But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.”

“The cloud of the consommé’s warmth enveloped her face and revived her poise. In the liquid a slice of lemon lay at fetal peace.”

“In that latitude the temperature flirted with a hundred degrees for a few of the dog days, but to a child it can hardly ever be too hot. I liked the sun licking the backs of my legs, and the sweat between my shoulder blades, and the violet evenings, with ice cream and fireflies, wherein the long day slowly cooled. I liked the ants piling up dirt like coffee grounds between the bricks of our front walk, and the milkweed spittle in the vacant lot next door. I liked the freedom of shorts, sneakers, and striped T-shirt, with freckles and a short hot-weather haircut.We love easily in summer, perhaps, because we love our summer selves.”

“Still, my fascination with Buchanan did not abate, nor was I able, as the Seventies set in, to move the novel forward through the constant pastiche and basic fakery of any fiction not fed by the springs of memory -- what Henry James calls (in a letter to Sarah Orne Jewett) the "fatal cheapness [and] mere escamotage" of the "'historic' novel.”

“We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.”

“From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few. ”