“A well-spun tale can transport listeners away from their humdrum lives and return them with an enlarged sense of the world.”

“It is not an unusual life curve for Westerners - to live i n and be shaped by the bigness, sparseness, space clarity & hopefulness of the West, to go away for study and enlargement and the perspective that distance and dissatisfaction can give, and then to return to what pleases the sight and enlists the loyalty and demands the commitment.”

“The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man’s-land.”

“There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are also the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of beind except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And . . . in whatever . . . place by whatever . . . name or by no name at all . . . all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.”

“For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are the selfsame tale and contain as well all within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.”

“Claude didn’t sound every note. He must’ve been playing from memory. There is an unguarded quality in musicians unaware of listening ears. Intimate, hearing the piece like that, played for no one, played from far away, the sound escaping onto a stairwell presumed empty. Sheherazade spun out her tales over a thousand and one Arabian nights. Her tales were her demand for life: I deserve to live so long as I can unravel such intrigue into the world. do not kill me now. Do not strangle me at dawn.I wondered if that trapped animal of a boy had left off rocking to listen. That pitiful youth, did he understand rapture? There was a terrible pain across my chest. It was the old pain, the old loss. This paper room at the top of the stairs in which, yesterday, my father had been, and now this unassuming beauty welling out of it, unbidden. Sunlight was spilling through the glass door on to the landing; the dust motes might have been there since time began. It was all immensely delicate and just beyond my reach. There were pockets of wonder all over the earth, I knew, like wild animals in glades, and I happened upon them now and then. Less so in America, because it was not my home, but there were pockets in America too, and I prized them all the more for their rarity. Once I blundered into them, the wonder took flight; it evaporated like dew. It was a matter of not blundering into them, of letting them be, of trying to live on the brink of them without intruding.”