Perhaps. But the firstborn of hope is tragedy.

And whether or not we had now paid our dues, he was my blessing, and I was his.

...it is fifty percent what they see, and fifty percent what they think they see.

She had died peacefully, in her sleep, after an evening of listening to all of her favorite Fred Astaire songs, one crackling record after another. Once the last chord of the last piece had died out, she had stood up and opened the French doors to the garden outside, perhaps waiting to breathe in the honeysuckle one more time.

A novel is, hopefully, the starting point of a conversation, one in which the author engages readers and asks that they see things from a different point of view than they might otherwise.

There is lust and then there is love. They are related, but still very different things. To indulge in one requires little but honeyed speech and a change of clothes; to obtain the other, by contrast, a man must give up his rib. In return, his woman will undo the sin of Eve, and bring him back into Paradise.

...had always taken for granted that the whole world was in a state of constantly fluctuating madness, and that a neurosis was not an illness, but a fact of life, like pimples.