He looks sad. Or maybe that's just how he looks when he isn't doing something else with his face.

That’s the thing about living vicariously; it’s so much faster than actual living. In a few minutes we’ll be worrying about names for the children.

Each spine was an encapsulated memory, each book represented hours, days of pleasure, of immersion into words.

I sleep all day. Noises flit around the house- garbage truck in the alley, rain, tree rapping against the bedroom window. I sleep. I inhabit sleep firmly, willing it, wielding it, pushing away dreams, refusing, refusing. Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion. [...] It is afternoon, it is night, it is morning. Everything is reduced to this bed, this endless slumber that makes the days into one day, makes time stop, stretches and compacts time until it is meaningless.

There was only the cemetery itself, spread out in the moonlight like a soft grey hallucination, a stony wilderness of Victorian melancholy.

I'm bored with knitting. I've taken up arson.

...all of our laments could not add a single second to her life, not one additional beat of the heart, nor a breath.