“She didn't belong here, amidst all the laughter, abandonment, the war cries of freedom. These other kids were alive and vibrant. She was chained and invisible.”

“She'd not known grief would come in waves, brought on by the smallest of things. Nor had she realized that ordinary acts of living would continue even after the loss of a love and that it would remain possible to get caught up in the moment of a simple pleasure before remembering.”

“Alex stood near Tiger Stadium. It was closed down now and abandoned, a ghost of itself. Alex loved baseball and lamented the new stadiums and their corporate sponsors. Who wanted to watch the almost spiritual game of baseball in a park named after a goddamned financial institution?”

“She siged, a sound of regret for childhood transgressions, for all the lessons learned too late.”

“Well, if she doesn't like pelicans she must be very disagreeable.”

“The large, gaping flaws in the construction of the stories--mad wives in the attic, strange apparitions in Belgium--are a representation of the life she could not face; these gothic subterfuges represent the mind at a breaking point, frantic to find any way out. If the flaws are only to be attributed to the practicce of popular fiction of the time, we cannot then explain the large amount of genuine feeling that goes into them. They stand for the hidden wishes of an intolerable life.”

“In this couple defects were multiplied, as if by a dangerous doubling; weakness fed upon itself without a counterstrength and they were trapped, defaults, mutually committed, left holes everywhere in their lives. When you read their letters to each other it is often necessary to consult the signature in order to be sure which one has done the writing. Their tone about themselves, their mood, is the fatal one of nostalgia--a passive, consuming, repetitive poetry. Sometimes one feels even its most felicitious and melodious moments are fixed, rigid in experession, and that their feelings have gradually merged with their manner, fallen under the domination of style. Even in their suffering, so deep and beyond relief, their tonal memory controls the words, shaping them into the Fitzgerald tune, always so regretful, regressive, and touched with a careful felicity.”