When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.

They were playing old Bob Dylan, more than perfect for narrow Village streets close to Christmas and the snow whirling down in big feathery flakes, the kind of winter where you want to be walking down a city street with your arm around a girl like on the old record cover.

There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty-unless she is wed to something more meaningful-is always superficial

I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.

Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry. “And what is beauty?” “Terror.

And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky—so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

Beauty alters the grain of reality.