“And that's when he finally tells me his name is Ernest. I'm thinking of giving it away, though. Ernest is so dull, and Hemingway? Who wants a Hemingway?”

“It was the end of Ernest's struggle with apprenticeship, and an end to other things as well. He would never again be unknown. We would never again be this unhappy.”

“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.”

“Ernest once told me that the word paradise was a Persian words that meant walled garden. I knew then that he understood how necessary the promises we made to each other were to our happiness. You couldn't have real freedom unless you knew were the walls were and tended to them. We could lean on the walls because they existed; they existed because we leaned on them.”

“There are things I didn't see before, like how nice it is to have someone around. Not the white knight whisking you away, but the fellow who sits at your table every night and tells you what he is thinking.”

“There was no back home any more, not in the essential way, and that was part of Paris too. Why we couldn't stop drinking or talking or kissing the wrong people no matter what it ruined. Some of us had looked into the faces of the dead and tried not to remember anything in particular. Ernest was one of these. He often said he'd died in the war, just for a moment; that his soul had left his body like a silk handkerchief, slipping out and levitating over his chest. It had returned without being called back, and I often wondered if writing for him was a way of knowing his soul was there after all, back in its place. Of saying to himself, if not to anyone else, that he had seen what he'd seen and felt those terrible things and lived anyway. That he had died but wasn't dead any more.”

“When I saw the rats the first time, I wanted to drop my basket where it was and run away, but we weren t rich enough for symbolic gestures. So I walked.”