“Love is the answer, said the songs, and that's OK. It was OK, I supposed, as an answer. But no more than that. It was not a solution; it wasn't really even an answer, just a reply.”

“it seemed one could just say are you serious? for the rest of existence and it would never be unjustified and would always have to be answered and so would keep the conversation going”

“I feared Sarah was one of those women who instead of laughing said, "That's funny," or instead of smiling said, "That's interesting," or instead of saying, "You are a stupid blithering idiot," said, "Well I think it's a little more complicated than that.”

“And though he continued never to express a single word of love for me, not in any way of his several languages, I could not take a hint. Let the hint be written across the heavens in skywriting done by several planes - I was dense. Even skywriting, well, it wasn't always certain: it might not cover the whole entire sky, or some breeze might smudge it, so who could really say for sure what it said? Even skywriting wouldn't have worked! Several years later, I would wonder why I had thought my feelings for this man were anything but a raw, thrilling, vigilant infatuation. But I still had called them love. I was in love. I had learned the Portuguese and the Arabic for love, but all for naught.”

“I guessed that only at the last possible minute did the soul in a determined fashion flee the dying flesh. Who could blame it for its reluctance? We loved our lives more than we ever knew, and at the end felt the bounty of them, as one would say in church, felt even the richness of their missed opportunities, or just understood that they were more than we had realized during the living of them and a lot to give up.”

“This was supposed to be the Presidential Suite," she said, gazing into the room at the holes in the wall.well, even presidents get shot," I said.I was just going to say that myself," she said, smiling. "But I didn't want to scare you."I didn't know whether this was interesting--that we were both thinking the same gruesome thing--or even whether it was actually the case. Perhaps it was just rhetorical ESP: Kreskin's Guide to Etiquette. But even if it was true, that we were about to say the same thing, did this connect us in some deep private way? Or was it just a random obviousness shared between strangers? The deeper life between two people I had yet to read with confidence. It seemed a kind of vaporous text that kept revising its very alphabet. An exfoliating narrative, my professors would probably say. The paratext of the possible.”

“I watched my friend Eleanor give birth," she said. "Once you've seen a child born, you realize a baby's not much more than a reconstituted ham and cheese sandwich. Just a little anagram of you and what you've been eating for nine months.”