“Love is so small it can tear itself through the eye of a needle”

“So we came to understand that small and important thing, that our lives could be large with interesting strangers who would pass us without any personal involvement.”

“I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he's in love with ghosts.”

“Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.”

“We are expanded by tears, we are told, not reduced by them.”

“when someone speaks he looks at a mouth, not eyes and their colors, which, it seems to him, will always alter depending on the light of a room, the minute of the day. Mouths reveal insecurity or smugness or any other point on the spectrum of character. For him they are the most intricate aspect of faces. He's never sure what an eye reveals. but he can read how mouths darken into callousness, suggest tenderness. One can often misjudge an eye from its reaction to a simple beam of sunlight.”

“As if this collection of things is what she is. So we fall in love with ghosts.”