“As a librarian for 18 years at the Merck branch of the Trenton Public Library, I was sorely tested by the slow-witted and obtuse among the citizenry”

“Because I am in love. Love is a slow bleed.”

“I would know of myself through the witnessing and naming of others. As Jesus in the Gospels is only seen and spoken of and recorded by others. I would know my existence and the value of that existence through others' eyes, which I believed I could trust as I could not trust my own.”

“For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?”

“You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There's a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can't alter. ”

“I was nineteen years five months old when I fell in love for the first time. This seemed to me a profound, advanced age; never can we anticipate being older than we are, or wiser; if we're exhausted, it's impossible to anticipate being strong; as, in the grip of a dream, we rarely understand that we're dreaming, and will escape by the simplest of methods, opening our eyes.”

“Knowing now I would never be alone again never lonely again as in those years God allowed me to be thus as if He did not exist forcing onto me the bitter knowledge that He did not exist in truth or if He did His existence touched in no way upon my own.”