So much of her time spent like this: dreaming up things to say and never quite saying them.

Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.

It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.

The essence of intelligence was to know when, or if, to expose even the heart's deep need for instruction.

Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.

And I suddenly think, as I look across the table at him, that these are the days as they will be. This is the future as we see it. The swerve and the static. The confidence and the doubt.

The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.