“A man should enjoy things if he can; he should spend his final days in the sun. Mine will be spent by a reading lamp.”

“I should have known by then that it's never the disasters you see coming that finally come to pass; it's the ones you don't expect at all.”

“They say that humans can read each other in a hundred subtle ways, that we can detect messages in the subtlest movements of a body, in the briefest expressions of a face, but somehow, on that day, I had communicated with amazing efficiency the exact opposite of what I most wanted in the world.”

“I knew everything about the back of that head - the swirl of his hair, the curve of his ear, the straight, sharp line of his jaw. I liked the way he smelled like soap even late in the afternoon.”

“ . . . perhaps the reasons for a man to leave his life were too obvious for him to name.”

“A finales de noviembre los días llegaron a tener cuarenta horas.”

“Of my grandfather's eighty-six years on the planet, he had lived two of them in Alaska...But those two years had expanded, sponge-like, in his memory, overtaking much of the rest. Whole decades had passed in California without producing a single worthy anecdote”