“My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabok...”

“A few nights later, I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell my brain? But in the morning my daughter asks me what a cloud is and I cannot say.”

“There is a husband who requires mileage receipts, another who wants sex at three a.m One who forbids short haircuts, another who refuses to feed the pets. I would never put up with that, the other ...”

“Someone had given my daughter a doctor's kit. Carefully, she takes her own temperature, places the pressure cuff around her arm. Then she takes the cuff off and examines it. "Would you like to be a...”

“My daughter breaks both her wrists jumping off of a swing. Her friend, who is five, told her to jump off of it. I promise nothing will happen, she said. But why did she promise that? she wails late...”

“The wife watched her neighbor get fat over the next year. The Germans have a word for that. Kummerspeck. Literally, grief bacon.”

“Courtesy costs nothing, but buys everything.”

“Whatever one of us asked the other to do - it was assumed the asker would weigh all the consequences - the other would do. Thus one might wake the other in the night and ask for a cup of water; and...”

“A Swedish minister having assembled the chiefs of the Susquehanna Indians, made a sermon to them, acquainting them with the principal historical facts on which our religion is founded such as the ...”

“I'm not sure this is a world I belong in anymore. I'm not sure that I want to wake up.”

“I half closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I'd ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny...”

“No one compares to you, but there's no you, except in my dreams tonight.”

“Looked at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself ...”

“Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina. I thought I had this clear, two years ago before I started, but I am no longer sure how this works. Perhaps a patina...”