“An agony. The exit like the entrance - but reversed. A palindrome: gut-tug.”

“Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks.”

“It is like having a book out from the library.It is like constantly having a book out from the library.”

“You chose love like a belief, a faith, a place, a box for one's heart to knock against like a spook in the house.”

“How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, presses her mouth upon the traveler’s mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really. One can go, and upon returning make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms. The mouth itself, working at the speed of light, at the eye’s instructions, is necessarily struck still; so fast, so much to report, it hangs open and dumb as a gutted bell. All that unsayable life! That’s where the narrator comes in. The narrator comes with her kisses and mimicry and tidying up. The narrator comes and makes a slow, fake song of the mouth’s eager devastation.”

“She decided it was perhaps a little like marriage itself: a good idea that, like all ideas, lived awkwardly on earth. -Terrific Mother”

“But family life sometimes had a vortex, like weather. It could be like a tornado in a quiet zigzag: get close enough and you might see within it a spinning eighteen-wheeler and a woman.”