“...the words make our silences easier--they're the current that runs under them.”

“But perhaps this is all to the good. Perhaps its best to live with the possibility that around any corner, at any time, may come the person who reminds you of your own capacity to surprise yourself...”

“It seems we need someone to know us as we are--with all we have done--and forgive us. We need to tell. We need to be whole in someone's sight: Know this about me, and yet love me. Please. ...for......”

“But even then I knew how it was going to be, I could feel the coming silence in the long, poisonous pauses that expanded as the night progressed.”

“And I was remembering that time in our lives together, the time of those ritual walks. I was remembering the way it feels at just that moment when you begin to turn, when youre poised exactly betwe...”

“This was all of it, no doubt, the strange passing feeling that had come to me in the boat. Age. Vanity. The impossibility of accepting the new versions of oneself that life kept offering. The impos...”

“Whoever is spared personal pain must feel himself called to help in diminishing the pain of others. We must all carry our share of the misery which lies upon the world.”

“I do believe God gave me a spark of genius, but he quenched it in misery.”

“We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or less miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same con...”