“Without devotion any life becomes a stranger's story...told for the body to forget what it once loved.”

“As a reviewer once told me, the story of Alexander’s tomb without a body is like Hamlet without the Prince…. The rest is silence.”

“I said that I have finished telling my story, not that the story is finished. I said before that no story is ever really finished, each one is part of a longer story and consists of smaller stories, some of which are told, others passed over in silence. And whenever you tell any one of the stories, whether you intend it or not, you include the shadow of all the others. The result is that once you have told one story, once you have undone the meshes of the net at one point, you are trapped. You are compelled to go on with the story. And because we ourselves, like all life, are stories, we become the story of the stories.”

“Annie, no stranger to disappointment, felt the hope break down inside her body and disperse without any lingering effects.”

“The story I have told throughout my work life I could not have told as well without Clarence.”

“A boy once told me that love without heartbreak is just a pretty myth.”