“By contrast, my wife at fifty-two yeas old seems to me just as attractive as the day I first met her. If I were to say this out loud, she would say, 'Douglas, that's just a line. No one prefers wri...”

“Well I can tell you now that married life is not a plateau, not at all. There are ravines and great jagged peaks and hidden crevasses that send the both of you scrabbling into darkness. Then there ...”

“Our biographies involve each other so intrinsically now that we're both on nearly every page. We know the answers because we were there, and so curiosity becomes hard to maintain; replaced, I suppo...”

“By the time Albie is my age I will be long gone, or, best-case scenario, barricaded into my living module with enough rations to see out my days. But outside, I imagine vast, unregulated factories ...”

“...grief is as much about regret for what you've never had as sadness for what you've lost.”

“It didn't help when he told David that his mother would always be with him, even if he couldn't see her. An unseen mother couldn't go for long walks with you on summer evenings, drawing the names o...”

“Oh, well, it might look like a patterned world, laid out in prim design, but to those living there it could never be so simple. They were as alive as she: that old peasant contriving to outwit the ...”

“I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one who poverty bothers.”

“I should like one day, as some anonymous pedestrian revisiting the scenes of these memories, to follow on the heels of an attentive reader - here are some - and to relish his delight when, with thi...”

“There are more places you haven't heard of then you're heard of!' I loved that”

“I follow a dairy-free and gluten-free diet, which can be challenging in some places.”

“I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places - poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes.”

“I do not know where to go, but I have been on the road.”

“While she was in transit, being unattached was exhilarating, but the moment she stopped, so did the high.”

“The natural tenderness and delicacy of our constitution, added to the many dangers we are subject to from your sex, renders it almost impossible for a single lady to travel without injury to her ch...”