“On the avenue, dark and tree-lined, shop windows began to blink on.”

“Stencil had called from a Hungarian coffee shop on York Avenue known as Hungarian Coffee Shop”

“…the warm glazes, the sparkling penumbra of the room itself and, through the little window framed with honeysuckle, in the rustic avenue, the resilient dryness of the sun-parched earth, veiled only by the diaphanous gauze woven of distance and the shade of the trees.”

“Oh, and we shopped! And since I was on a budget, I also did a lot of simple window shopping, or as the French say, le lèche-vitrines: "we licked the window".”

“Living with her taught me this:That silence is a thick and dark curtain,the kind that pulls down over a shop window;that love is the repercussion of a stonebouncing off that same window - and that painis something you can embrace, like a rag dollnobody will ask you to share.”

“Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?”