“It was august. for years it was august … . there was heat like wet gauze and a high, white sky and music coming from everywhere at once.”

“I can't see how I'll make it a year this way," he said."It seems impossible, I know. But when we're old and doddering, this year will seem like a blink.”

“This was my one brush with love. Was it love? It felt awful enough. I spent another two years crawling around in the skin of it, smoking too much and growing too thin and having stray thoughts of jumping from my balcony like a tortured heroine in a Russian novel.”

“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.”

“It had been a false spring, a lie like all the other lies, and I found myself wondering it it would ever really come.”

“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.”

“I loved him for a full year and then, in one night, all my wishing came apart.”