“There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.”

“The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many chara...”

“Other than along certain emotional tangents there was little in the book that felt as if it had actually been lived. It was a fiction produced by someone who knew only fictions, The Tempest as writ...”

“Although it wasn't raining anymore, the air was still heavy with water, and rain gutters were ringing all over Point Breeze.”

“[His coat] emitted an odor of bus station so desolate that just standing next to him you could feel your luck changing for the worse.”

“As long as she was falling in love with me, I might as well start making her promises I didn't intend to keep.”

“I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume tha...”

“Nobody ever gets what they want when it comes to love.”

“The strength of a love is always misjudged if we evaluate it by its immediate cause and not the stress that went before it, the dark and hollow space full of disappointment and loneliness that prec...”