“There's a hurried intensity in the strokes--you can see where he scratched into the wet paint with the end of the brush. It's as if he knew there wasn't much time left. And yet, there's a serenity in his face, a sense of something that's survived its own ruin.”

“The little boy I watched throwing pebbles into the empty fountain, he wasn't too old to climb trees. You could tell he had too much wisdom for his age. Probably he believed that he wasn't made for this world. I wanted to say to him: If not you, who?”

“When I was with Yoav, everything in me that had been sitting stood up. He had a way of looking at me with a kind of unabashed directness that made me shiver. It's something amazing to feel that for the first time someone is seeing you as you really are, not as they wish you, or you wish yourself, to be.”

“Because it hardly ends with falling in love. Just the opposite. I don't need to tell you, Your Honor, I sense that you understand true loneliness. How you fall in love and it's there that the work begins: day after day, year after year, you must dig yourself up, exhume the contents of your mind and sould for the other to sift through so that you might be known to him, and you, too, must spend days and years wading through all that he excavates for you alone, the archaeology of his being, how exhausting it became, the digging up and the wading through, while my own work, my true work, lay waiting for me. Yes, I always thought there would be more time left for me, more time left for us, and for the child we might one day have, but I never felt that my work could be put aside as they could, my husband and the idea of our child, a little boy or girl that I sometimes even tried to imagine, but always only vaguely enough that he or she remained a ghostly emissary of our future, just her back while she sat playing with her blocks on the floor, or just his feet sticking out of the blanket on our bed, a tiny pair of feet. What of it, there would be time for them, for the life they stood for, the one I was not yet prepared to live because I had not yet done what I had meant to do in this one.”

“He could hear Donald saying something else but it didn't matter anymore what, because then and there it occurred to him that maybe the emptiness he'd been living with all this time hadn't really been emptiness at all, but loneliness gone unrecognized. How can a mind know how alone it is until it brushes up against some other mind? A single mark had been made, another person's memory imposed onto his mind, and now the magnitude of his own loss was impossible for Samson to ignore. It was breathtaking. He sank to his knees...It was as if a match had been struck, throwing light on just how dark it was.”

“A wave of nausea came over me. And yet. Sometimes you need a stroke of genius and, lo and behold, genius comes and strokes you”

“Even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist, there are still those that lie beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And then, for the millionth time in the history of feeling, the heart surges and absorbs the impact.”