“When he comes into a room, you give a little gasp, deep inside, far inside,' someone once said when trying to describe what it meant to love.”

“To love someone is to catch your breath whenever he walks in the room.”

“It is almost impossible to describe happiness, because at the time it feels entirely natural, as if all the rest of your life has been the aberration; only in retrospect does it swim into focus as the rare and precious thing it is. When it is present, it seems to be eternal, abiding forever, and there is no need to examine it or clutch it. Later, when it has evaporated, you stare in dismay at your empty palm, where only a little of the perfume lingers to prove that once it was there, and now is flown.”

“He watched their faces, and he knew each meant desperately what she said because they loved each other, and deep inside surely each knew the words were false, that the true words were those unspoken.”

“Oh, he was just angry, we tell ourselves when someone blurts out something he later apologizes for. But a word, once spoken, lingers forever; to keep peace we pretend to forget, but we never do. Strange that a spoken word can have such lasting power when words carved on stone monuments vanish in spite of all our efforts to preserve them. What we would lose persists, lodged in our minds, and what we would keep is lost to water, moths, moss.”

“In France her tutor had once taught her that to truly fix an image in the mind to fasten it down completely so that it remained forever captive and vivid she should carefully name each aspect of the thing to herself as though she were describing it to a blind person. "For ma petite such is the fickleness of the human mind that it soon lets go of whatever it sees if you would keep it you must tack it down with words." She had tried it and found that it worked on flowers rooms faces ceremonies.”

“Lying in bed, half-covered by the blankets, I would drowsily ask why he had come to my door that night long ago. It had become a ritual for us, as it does for all lovers: where, when, why? remember...I understand even old people rehearse their private religion of how they first loved, most guarded of secrets. And he would answer, sleep blurring his words, "Because I had to." The question and the answer were always the same. Why? Because I had to.”