“The piece was like an elegant interrogation made of tangled yarn, a query from a well-dressed man in a casket, not yet dead. It proceeded slowly, like a careful equation, and then not: if x = y, if major = minor, if death equals part of life and life part of death, then what is the sum of the infinite notes of this one phrase? It asked, answered, reasked, its moody asking a refinement of reluctance or dislike.”

“She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.”

“It is unacceptable, all the stunned and anxious missing a person is asked to endure in life. It is not to be endured, not really.”

“Tell him not to smoke in your apartment. Tell him to get out. At first he protests. But slowly, slowly, he leaves, pulling up the collar on his expensive beige raincoat, like an old and haggard Robert Culp. Slam the door like Bette Davis. Love drains from you, takes with it much of your blood sugar and water weight. You are like a house slowly losing its electricity, the fans slowing, the lights dimming and flickering; the clocks stop and go and stop.”

“I had seen this exact same expression and movement before - where? In the future I would come to know that look as the beginning of the end of love - the death of a man's trying. It read as Haughty Fatigue. Like the name of a stripper.”

“Like true friends, they take no hardy or elegant stance loosely choreographed from some broad perspective. They get right in there and mutter "Jesus Christ!" and shake their heads.”

“Pulling through is what people do around here. There is a kind of bravery in their lives that isn’t bravery at all. It is automatic, unflinching, a mix of man and machine, consuming and unquestionable obligation meeting illness move for move in a giant even-steven game of chess – an unending round of something that looks like shadowboxing, though between love and death, which is the shadow? “Everyone admires us for our courage,” says one man. “They have no idea what they’re talking about.”“Courage requires options,” the man adds.“There are options,” says a woman with a thick suede headband. “You could give up. You could fall apart.”“No you can’t. Nobody does. I’ve never seen it,” says the man. “Well, not really fall apart.”