“The prose can be brutally beautiful. But the semester starts, you fall in love, get deflowered, watch Kennedy die and the Beatles invade, get high to listen to Coltrane, and discover Heller, Ellison, Ferlighetti, and Bellow -- writing that flows across the page in huge bright swaths that you didn't know English could permit.”

“Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator’s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here’s spring.”

“It had to be U. U. was the only town I could still bear, the one spot in the atlas I'd already absorbed head-on. When you take too many of your critical hits in one place, that place can no longer hurt you.”

“On the ride back south, she tapped all the anger-management tricks they'd given her in job training. They played across her windshield like PowerPoint slides. Number One: It's not about you. Number Two: Your plan is not the world's. Number Three: The mind can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

“In that weekly ecstatic keeping of faith and bearing of witness, Delia fell in love with singing. Singing was something that might make sense of a person. Singing might make more sense of life than living had to start with.”

“I picked up an old microscope at a flea market in Verona. In the long evenings, in my imitation of life science, I set up in the courtyard and examined local specimens. Pointless pleasure, stripped of ends. The ancient contadino from across the road, long since convinced that we were mad, could not resist coming over for a look.I showed him where to put his eye. I watched him, thinking, this is how we attach to existence. We look through awareness’s tube and see the swarm at the end of the scope, taking what we come upon there for the full field of sight itself.The old man lifted his eye from the microscope lens, crying.Signore, ho ottantotto anni e non ho mai Saputo prima che cosa ci fosse in una goccia d’acqua. I’m eighty-eight years old and I never knew what was in a droplet of water.”

“The morning was glorious, one of those crystalline, dry, blue, fall days when the temperature hovers right at anticipation.”