“What I really felt was this: chopped down like a tree, a new feeling, and I was realizing that all new feelings from here on in would probably be bad ones. Surprises would no longer be good. And feelings might take on actual physical form, like those sad fish lips, a mouth speared into a gasping silence, or worse. ”

“I was realising that all new feelings from here on in would probably be bad ones. Surprises would no longer be good.”

“My new apartment might be a place where there are lots of children. They might gather on my porch to play, and when I step out for groceries, they will ask me, "Hi, do you have any kids?" and then, "Why not, don't you like kids?""I like kids," I will explain. "I like kids very much." And when I almost run over them with my car, in my driveway, I will feel many different things.”

“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.”

“While my scarcely controlled rage flew from my mouth in sentences I hoped would be, perhaps not then but perhaps later, like knives to her brain.”

“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.”

“When you find out who you are, you will no longer be innocent. That will be sad for others to see. All that knowledge will show on your face and change it. But sad only for others, not for yourself. You will feel you have a kind of wisdom, very mistaken, but a mistake of some power to you and so you will sadly treasure it and grow it.”