“We search for patterns, you see, only to find where the patterns break. And it’s there, in that fissure, that we pitch our tents and wait.”

“...we take comfort in the symmetries we find in life because they suggest a design where there is none.”

“If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom you feel distant, your hands sometimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms - if you find yourself at a loss for what to do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignness of your own body - it’s because your hands remember a time when the division between mind and body, brain and heart, what’s inside and what’s outside was much less. It’s not that we’ve forgotten the language of gestures entirely. The habit of moving our hands while we speak is left over from it. Clapping, pointing, giving the thumbs up : all artifacts of ancient gestures. Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together. And at night, when it’s too dark to see, we find it necessary to gesture on each other’s body to make ourselves understood.”

“I hadn't thought about it until just now, but the night Daniel rang our bell in the winter of 1970 was the end of November, the same time of year she died twenty-seven years later. I don't know what's that supposed to tell you; nothing, except that we take comfort in the symmetries we find in life because they suggest a design where there is none.”

“But see, the incredible thing about people is that we forget," Ray continued. "Time passes and somehow the hope creeps back and sooner or later someone else comes along all over again. We go through our lives like that, and either we just accept the lesser relationship -- it may not be total understanding, but it's pretty good -- or we keep trying for the perfect union, trying and failing, leaving behind us a trail of broken hearts, our own included. In the end, we die as alone as we were born, having struggled to understand others, to make ourselves understood, but having failed in what we once imagined was possible.”

“The truth was I'd given up waiting long ago. The moment had passed, the door between the lives we could have led and the lives we led had shut in our faces. Or better to say, in my face. Grammar of my life: as a rule of thumb, wherever there appears a plural, correct for singular. Should I ever let slip a royal We put me out of my misery with a swift blow to the head.”

“The moment had passed, the door between the lives we could have led and the lives we led had shut in our faces.”