“But if the words struck her only lightly when she was nine, they stayed with her, gaining in density, to insinuate themselves whenever her performance fell short of perfection. They were less a mortification, she feared, than an actual statement of fact: B+ is all you deserve.”

“Real, she imagined later on, was something else; it had nothing to do with things you could touch. Real was being seen, noticed, acknowledged, and later remembered. Real was people thinking about you when you weren't in the room. If others thought about you, then you must be more than a made-up dream. You need other people to be real, she decided. Otherwise you might just be a speck, an atom, inventing an elaborate story. It seemed like a paradox, but it must be so. She knew other people were real by thinking about them. Her thinking of her parents and her brothers, her school friends, were proof that they were real. They were both outside and in her head. But how could she be sure she was in anyone's head?”

“She'd been prepared for him to say he was too old, she must put away that sweet but impractical idea, they would forget all about it and go back to being good friends. She had almost hoped he would say that; it would forestall the complication and entanglement, yet leave her with a grief to harbor, sad but tender, grief like a secret, soothing companion. But this! There was nothing soothing about this.”

“Head held high and lips parted, she breathed in the music, sending it through her torso and arms and legs the way the Tai Chi teacher told us to breath the air, transforming it into energy, motion. Dancing is the body's song, and Bess sang.”

“Like the bodies of dancers or athletes, the minds of readers are genuinely happy and self-possessed only when cavorting around, doing their stretches and leaps and jumps to the tune of words.”

“The stillness and stasis of bed are the perfect opposite of travel: inertia is what I've come to consider the default mode, existentially and electronically speaking. Bed, its utter inactivity, offers a glimpse of eternity, without the drawback of being dead.”

“I have managed not to finish certain books. With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more than anything else, readers are thrill-seekers, though I don't read thrillers, not the kind sold under that label, anyway. They don't thrill; only language thrills.”