“Like God,you hover above the page staring downon a small town. Outside a windowsome scenery loafs in a sleepy hammockof pastoral prose and here is a mongrelloping and here is a train approachingthe station in three long sentences andhere are the people in galoshes waiting.But you know this story about the galoshesis really About Your Life, so, like a diverclimbing over the side of a boat and downinto the ocean, you climb, sentenceby sentence, into this story on this page.You have been expecting yourselfas a woman who purrs by in a dressby Patou, and a porter manacled tothe luggage, and a man stalking acrossthe page like a black cloud in a bad mood.These are your fellow travelers andyou are a face behind or inside thesefaces, a heartbeat in the volley of theseheartbeats, as you choose, out of allthe journeys, the journey of a manwith a mustache scented faintly withPrince Albert. "He must be a secretsensualist," you think and your awarenessdrifts to his trench coat, worn, softened,and flabby, a coat with a lobotomy, justas the train pulls into the station.No, you would prefer another stopin a later chapter where the climate isaffable and sleek. But the passengersare disembarking, and you did notchoose to be in the story of the womanin the white dress which is as cool andevil as a glass of radioactive milk. Youdid not choose to be in the story of thematron whose bosom is like the prowof a ship and who is launched towardlunch at the Hotel Pierre, or even thestory of the dog-on-a-leash, even thoughthis is now your story: the story of theperson-who-had-to-take-the-train-and-walk-the-dark-road described hurriedlyby someone sitting at the tavern so you coulddiscover it, although you knew all alongthe road would be there, you, who havebeen hovering above this page, holdingthe book in your hands, like God, reading.”

“There isn't a story to tell, because a relationship is a story you construct together and take up residence in, a story as sheltering as a house. You invent this story of how your destinies were made to entwine like porch vines, you adjust to a big view in this direction and no view in that, the doorway that you have to duck through and the window that is jammed, how who you think you are becomes a factor of who you think he is and who he thinks you are, a castle in the clouds made out of the moist air exhaled by dreamers.”

“*I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago...*So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right. *We get one story, you and I, and one story alone....It might be time for you to go. It might be time to change, to shine out.”

“How do you end a story that’s not yours? Add another sentence where there is a pause? Infiltrate the story with a comma when really there should have been a period? Punctuate with an exclamation point where a period would have sufficed? What if you kill something breathing and breathe life into something the author wanted to eliminate? How do you get inside the mind of a person who isn’t there? Fill the shoes of someone who will never again fill his own?”

“I'll tell you how the sun rose A ribbon at a time... It's a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It doesn't matter how old you are; it is coming to a close quickly, and soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still and silence. And they will make a fire and pour some wine and think about how you once were . . . and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you never again will be. So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right. You will know by the page count, not by the narrative, that the Author is wrapping things up. You begin to mourn its ending, and want to pace yourself slowly toward its closure, knowing the last lines will speak of something beautiful, of the end of something long and earned, and you hope the thing closes out like last breaths, like whispers about how much and who the characters have come to love, and how authentic the sentiments feel when they have earned a hundred pages of qualification. And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?”

“When you read a book, the story definitely happens inside your head. When you listen, it seems to happen in a little cloud all around it, like a fuzzy knit cap pulled down over your eyes.”