“Life meant reducing expectations and making-do with what one had.”

“He could not do most things, and what he could do, he did. But William had always been capable of many things. The stress of choice had weighed on him.”

“She was like a farmer who keeps horses in order to haul away the manure that they generate.”

“She can't understand that books don't get used up. I've tried to explain that they aren't like clothes or furniture-that we keep them because we might want to read them again. And because they remind us of how we felt when we read them.”

“He doesn't understand that books don't get used up. I've tried to explain that they aren't like clothes or furniture - that we keep them because we might want to read them again. And because they remind us of how we felt when we read them.”

“We knew what we had and what it meant, and though so much had happened since for both of us, there was nothing like those years in Paris, after the war. Life was painfully pure and simple and good, and I believed Ernest was his best self then. I got the very best of him. We got the best of each other.”

“They’d scared me and had me thinking about what it meant to be really strong, on my own terms—not just fit and brown from the sun, not just flexible and accommodating.”