“Time itself made all things rare.”

“That was one of your favorite themes: that profusion, replication, popularity wasn't necessarily devaluing, and that time itself made all things rare. You loved to savor the present tense and were more conscious than anyone I have ever met that its every constituent is fleeting.”

“I thought at the time that I couldn't be horrified anymore, or wounded. I suppose that's a common conceit, that you've already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.”

“But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.”

“In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.”

“And Lawrence was afraid of the main thing. He had a tendency to talk feverishly all around the main thing, as if bundling it with twine. Presumably if he talked in circles around the main thing for long enough it would lie there, vanquished, panting on its side, like a roped steer.”

“You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.”