“He had written in cheap ballpoint ink that had blotted the five pages in many places. His handwriting was a looping but legible scrawl, and ha must have been bearing down hard, because the words were actually engraved into the cheap notebook pages; if I'd closed my eyes and run my fingertips over the backs of those torn-out sheets, it would have been like reading Braille”

“I read it over and over again. I turned it over, turned it back, smoothed it out on my pillow and then read it some more. It was written on a piece of torn-out spiral notebook paper. It had seams like it had been folded and unfolded a few times. I looked into the manila envelope again to see if there was anything else. There wasn't.”

“He opened his mouth. The words were there. He was about to say them when a jolt of terror went through him, the terror of someone who, wandering in a mist, pauses only to realise that they have stopped inches from the edge of a gaping abyss. The way she was looking at him - she could read what was in his eyes, he realised. It must have been written plainly there, like words on the page of a book. There had been no time, no chance, to hide it.“Will,” she whispered. “Say something, Will.”But there was nothing to say. There was only emptiness, as there had been before her. As there would always be.'I have lost everything', Will thought. 'Everything.”

“I stopped in St. Bernadette's Cemetery one of my favorite places... The trunks of six giant oaks rise like columns supporting a ceiling formed by their interlocking crowns. In the quiet space below, is laid out an aisle similar to those in any library. The gravestones are like rows of books bearing the names of those whose names have been blotted from the pages of life; who have been forgotten elsewhere but are remembered here.”

“Surely it is better, thought Domenica, that forty-five should buy the book and actually read it, than should many thousands, indeed millions, buy it and put it on their shelves, like...Professor Hawking's Brief History of Time. That was a book that had been bought by millions, but had been demonstrated to have been read by only a minute proportion of those who had acquired it. For do we not all have a copy of that on our shelves, and who amongst us can claim to have read beyond the first page, in spite of the pellucid prose of its author and his evident desire to share with us his knowledge of...of whatever it is that the book is about?”

“It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.”