And Clare, always Clare.

He had never realized, while Elspeth was alive, the extent to which a thing had not completely happened until he told her about it.

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

Do you ever miss him? Every day. Every minute. Every minute, she says. Yes, it's that way, isn't it?

I sit quietly and think about my mom. It's funny how memory erodes, If all I had to work from were my childhood memories, my knowledge of my mother would be faded and soft, with a few sharp memories standing out.

I'm living under water. Everything seems slow and far away. I know there's a world up there, a sunlit quick world where time runs like dry sand through an hourglass, but down here, where I am, air and sound and time and feeling are thick and dense.

that's what I love you for: your inability to perceive all my hideous flaws