“Our conversation starts out pretty normal. Matthew does most of the talking, as usual. He tells me about Wesley. He tells me everything. Well, almost everything. I was lucky enough to stop him before he got into the explicit details. Wesley also helped by nudging him with his shoulder. He even covered Matthew's mouth when the conversation took a sudden turn because the word package was used. Yeah, the conversation went from sweet and romantic to soft-core porn in about two seconds.”

“MRS. ALLONBY. It is only fair to tell you beforehand he has got no conversation at all.LADY STUTFIELD. I adore silent men.MRS ALLONBY. Oh, Ernest isn't silent. He talks the whole time. But he has got no conversation. What he talks about I don't know. I haven't listened to him for years.”

“He started to do that, started to inform me of everything; the inconsequential, the meaningful; conversations that ended in a cul-de-sac of unanswerable rhetoric. i think it was because I knew everything about him, had read it all - the beautiful, the sordid, the all of his book. I had been his editor for 5 years, and now it seemed, had become his editor away from the printed page.”

“My father used to say, 'If you want to know the artist, look at the art'. He was usually talking about Stanley Matthews or Don Bradman when he said it.”

“He comes down next to me, and when I hold out my hand, he takes it. Our fingers lace together. And in that feeling, that perfect feeling of our hands and fingers pressed together, I want to tell him everything. I want to tell him about Josh, and his sister, Emily. I want to tell him about tall, crazy Gert. I want to tell him about bridges and funerals, and most of all, maps. More than anything else, I want to tell him about myself. I want to tell him that I know what things look like from above now. There's so much I want to tell him, because I know he'll understand.”

“When my father-in-law, Jan Vuijst, a Dutch Reformed minister, was on his deathbed, I had a deeply intimate conversation with him - as it turned out, my last conversation with him. He said to me, 'It was a privilege to have lived.' The soulful gratitude of that simple statement will never leave me.”