“Are we not like two volumes of one book? ”

“Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists. When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.”

“...how odd to think of one's life not as chapters in a book but as complete volumes, separate and distinct.”

“We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.”

“Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head.”

“Life gives us the music but we can raise or lower the volume as we like ”