“When we finish a book, why do we hold it in both hands and gaze at it as if it were somehow alive?”

“We cried and sobbed and wept and bled tears. But when we were finished, all we could do was continue living.”

“It didn't last, it wasn't clear for much longer, and that's why we broke up, but when I close this book and give it to you, I don't think about that, just us holding the book it our hands to buy it and take it here with us, because damn it Ed, that's not why we broke up. I love it, I miss it, I hate to give it back to you, this complicated thing, it's why we stayed together.”

“I don't know why we stopped reading together, but gradually we were not doing it regularly, and then without realizing it was happening we were reading different books, and gradually we came not to care about the book the other one was reading, because it was not the book we were reading, and we became bored and drifted off when the other one talked about his book. What we were doing, reading different books, was furnishing different rooms, constructing separate worlds almost, in which we could sit and be ourselves again. Of course those were rooms in which we each sat alone, and we gradually spent more and more time in them and less and less in the house we lived in together.”

“Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands? ”

“We hope for things we may not get to see, and we hold on with both hands because it's one of the few things that can't be stolen from us.”