“And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he's gone like a whisper, the easiest breath.”

“Here and gone. That’s what it is to be human, I think—to be both someone and no one at once, to hold a particular identity in the world (our names, our place of origins, our family and affectional ties) and to feel that solid set of ties also capable of dissolution, slipping away, as we become moments of attention.”

“This is what history is: all those centuries of bodies, moving over these canals, twisting and blooming into life in these houses, these streets; all that flesh hungering, coming together, separating, continuing, accumulating, relinquishing, aging and breaking down. Bodies as tulips bent to the demands of light, colored into blossom, spent.”

“...in the face of all dangers, in what may seem a godless region, we move forward through the agencies of love and art.”

“And now, a heap of rosesbeside the sea, white rugosabeside the foaming hem of shore: brave,waxen candles… And we talkas if death were a line to be crossed.Look at them, the white roses.Tell me where they end.”

“under the radiant towers, the floodlit ramparts, must have wondered at my impulse to touch her, which was like touching myself,the way your own hand feels when you hold it because you want to feel contained.”

“Intimacy, says the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, is the highest value. I resist this statement at first. What about artistic achievement, or moral courage, or heroism, or altruistic acts, or work in the cause of social change? What about wealth or accomplishment? And yet something about it rings true, finally—that what we want is to be brought into relationship, to be inside, within. Perhaps it’s true that nothing matters more to us than that.”