For me, heaven would be a lack of alienation. The whole time I was growing up, I felt comfort was inherently evil. I think that for me heaven isn't about couches and milk shakes and never having a troubling thought again.

It's very weird to succeed at thirty-nine years old and realize that in the midst of your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway.

She liked to imagine that when she passed the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was.

After telling the hard facts to anyone from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes. Often it is awe or admiration, sometimes it is repulsion, once or twice it has been fury hurled directly at me for reasons I remain unsure of.

The stains could be seen only in the sunlight, so Ruth was never really aware of them until later, when she would stop at an outdoor cafe for a cup of coffee, and look down at her skirt and see the dark traces of spilled vodka or whiskey. The alcohol had the effect of making the black cloth blacker. This amused her; she had noted in her journal: 'booze affects material as it does people'.

But she was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. At seventy she had come to believe in time alone. ~pg 254

"When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things," Franny said. "What about the dead?" I asked. "Where do we go?"