“The students lurked on the edges of their teachers' lives for years, and brought bulletins from their own lives, which over time began to include lovers, ambitions, an upward trajectory.”

“Being a teacher at a restaurant in the town where you lived was a little like being a TV star...”

“New teachers were just a part of life, for a few days after one arrived, squawks of interest were emitted from various corners, but then they died away as the teacher was absorbed like everyone else...before you knew it, the fresh ones seemed to have been teaching there forever too, or else they didn't last very long, and were gone before you'd gotten to know them.”

“It seemed that everywhere you went, people quickly adapted to the way they had to live, and called it Life.”

“When you lived a certain kind of life, pushed along by good colleges and internships and jobs and a shared, tranquil neighborhood and a world of privilege in which your child overlapped, you were inevitably part of a long chain of connections. All of them could help one another; the possibilities were there if they wanted them, though many of them didn't seem to want them anymore, or maybe they had somehow forgotten they had once wanted them.”

“People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness.”

“You stayed around your children as long as you could, inhaling the ambient gold shavings of their childhood, and at the last minute you tried to see them off into life and hoped that the little piece of time you’d given them was enough to prevent them from one day feeling lonely and afraid and hopeless. You wouldn’t know the outcome for a long time.”