“Things, however, rarely happened the way you understood them. Mostly they just sort of drove up alongside what you thought was the case and then moved randomly down some other way.”

“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.”

“Begin to wonder what you do write about. Or if you have anything to say. Or even if there is such a thing as a thing to say. Limit these thoughts to no more than ten minutes a day; like sit-ups, they can make you thin”

“I felt sorry for Mary-Emma and all she was going through, every day waking up to something new. Though maybe that was what childhood was. But I couldn't quite recall that being the case for me. And perhaps she would grow up with a sense that incompetence was all around here, and it was entirely possible I would be instrumental in that. She would grow up with love, but no sense that the people who loved her knew what they were doing - the opposite of my childhood - and so she would become suspicious of people, suspicious of love and the worth of it. Which in the end, well, would be a lot like me. So perhaps it didn't matter what happened to you as a girl: you ended up the same.”

“Love is art, not truth. It's like painting a scenery.' These are the things one takes from mothers. Once they die, of course, you get the strand of pearls, the blue quilt, some of the original wedding gifts - a tray shellacked with the invitation, an old rusted toaster - but the touches and the words and the moaning the night she dies, these are what you seize, save, carry around in little invisible envelopes, opening them up quickly, like a carnival huckster, giving the world a peek. They will not stay quiet. No matter how you try.”

“This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.”

“When she packed up to leave, she knew that she was saying goodbye to something important, which was not that bad, in a way, because it meant that at least you had said hello to it to begin with...”