“He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved.”

“But what was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate? He couldn't remember being a child and being able to define happiness ...”

“You boys are really turning into a bunch of Peter Pans," he said. "Willem, what are you? Thirty-six? I'm not sure what's going on with you lot. Youre making money. You've achieved something. Don't ...”

“You understand that proof of your friendship lay in keeping your distance, in accepting what was told you, in turning and walking away when the door was shut in your face instead of trying to force...”

“To no one, he knew, not even to Willem. But he'd had years to learn how to keep his thoughts to himself; unlike his friends, he had learned not to share evidence of his oddities as a way to disting...”

“[Friendship] It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mu...”

“. . . breathing slowly and rubbing his palm against his chest as if to soothe his heart.”

“...he lacked the sort of ambition that JB and Jude had, that grim, trudging determination that kept them at the studio or office longer than anyone else, that gave them that slightly faraway look i...”

“They have been having sex for eighteen months now (he realizes he has to make himself stop counting, as if his sexual life is a prison term, and he is working toward its completion).”

“I am insane, does that surprise you? Ha! I think my mind is crumbling, just like crackers. If I had written five minutes earlier I would have wept, if I had written ten minutes earlier I would have...”

“When we think we're multitasking we're actually multiswitching. That is what the brain is very good at doing - quickly diverting its attention from one place to the next. We think we're being produ...”

“Learn to deal with the fact that you are not a perfect person but you are a person that deserves respect and honesty.”

“Miss Parkinson lived alone in a big bay-windowed house of Edwardian brick with a vast garden of decaying fruit trees and untidy hedges of gigantic size. She was great at making elderberry wine and ...”

“The child was slender as fleeting hope.”

“They passed, leaving a trail of foxfire shuffled up out of the wet leaves like stars plowed in a ship's wake.”