“Widowers marry again because it makes their lives easier. Widows often don't, because it makes their lives harder. [p. 61]”

“Shorn of intimacy and seen from a considerable distance, we are all comic characters, farcical buffoons who bumble through our lives, making fine messes as we go, but when you get close, the ridiculous quickly fades into the sordid or the tragic or the merely sad. [p. 73]”

“Je n'écris plus, je suis écrite. (p.86)”

“We must all allow ourselves the fantasy of projection from time to time, a chance to clothe ourselves in the imaginary gowns and tails of what has never been and never will be. This gives some polish to our tarnished lives, and sometimes we may choose one dream over another, and in the choosing find some respite from ordinary sadness. After all, we, none of us, can ever untangle the knot of fictions that make up that wobbly thing we call a self.”

“Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.”

“There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.”

“Le cou n'est-il pas l'endroit où finit la tête et où le corps commence? (p.148)”