“But that's a way to go on loving--a place, or a person. To miss it. In fact, to go away, to put yourself in the state of missing, is sometimes the simplest way to preserve love. [p. 56]”

“. . . solitude, which is held to be cause of eccentricity, in fact imposes excessive normality, and least in public . . . [p. 7]”

“But tears are not, like blood, shed by all involuntarily and according to the same determinants. And I had come to wonder, from the cauterized state of my own emotions then, whether those who have suppressed or diverted the course of strong feeling are sometimes left immune, with nothing more than just such superficial traces of what was once a great affliction. [p. 78]”

“It mattered to us both to have some point of reference in that strange place, some means of attesting to the effect it had on us. [p. 87]”

“He had seen how people came a cropper by giving way to impulse. It was to his judiciousness, at every turn, that he owed the fact that nothing terrible had ever happened to him.”

“Women can be divided, more or less, into cows and shrews, and the shrews are to be avoided. [p. 74]”

“It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of.”