“Theyd scared me and had me thinking about what it meant to be really strong, on my own termsnot just fit and brown from the sun, not just flexible and accommodating.”

“Not everyone believed in marriage then. To marry was to say you believed in the future and in the past, too - that history and tradition and hope could stay knit together to hold you up.”

“We knew what we had and what it meant, and though so much had happened since for both of us, there was nothing like those years in Paris, after the war. Life was painfully pure and simple and good,...”

“I preferred to look at the sea, which said nothing and never made you feel alone.”

“He was a humorist, and everyone knew the funny writers were the most serious sort under their skins.”

“There are some who said I should have fought harder or longer than I did for my marriage, but in the end fighting for love that was already gone felt like trying to live in the ruins of a lost city.”

“Paris was all so... Parisian. I was captivated by the wonderful wrongness of it all - the unfamiliar fonts, the brand names in the supermarket, the dimensions of the bricks and paving stones. Child...”

“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.”