When it's over you look up: the world looks the same but you are somehow different and that feeling lingers for days.

When we met I was wrecked, blasted, and damned, and I am slowly pulling myself together because I can see that you are a human being and I would like to be one, too.

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

I have a sort of Christmas-morning sense of the library as a big box full of beautiful books.

Mom had just gotten back from Sydney, and she had brought me an immense, surpassingly blue butterfly, Papilio ulysses, mounted in a frame filled with cotton. I would hold it close to my face, so close I couldn't see anything but that blue. It would fill me with a feeling, a feeling I later tried to duplicate with alcohol and finally found again with Clare, a feeling of unity, oblivion, mindlessness in the best sense of the word.

There is only one page left to write on. I will fill it with words of only one syllable. I love. I have loved. I will love.

Home sweet home. No place like home. Take me home, country roads. Home is where the heart is. But my heart is here. So I must be home. Clare sighs, turns her head, and is quiet. Hi, honey. I'm home. I'm home.