“Everybody asks the same questions -- but they don't know that they ask the same questions.”

“I have spent my life waiting for something to happen,’ she said. ‘And I have come to understand that nothing will. Or it already has, and I blinked during that moment and it's gone. I don't know which is worse — to have missed it or to know there is nothing to miss.”

“I wanted to wear the mantle and the pearls. I wanted to know the man who painted her like that.”

“We say very little, for we do not need to. We are silent together, each in her own world, knowing the other is just at her back.”

“I had walked along that street all my life, but had never been so aware that my back was to my home”

“He saw things in a way that others did not, so that a city I had lived in all my life seemed a different place, so that a woman became beautiful with the light on her face.”

“It's a rare book that wins the battle against drooping eyelids.”