There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.

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

To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole.

...with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.

Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.

Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things - naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror - are too terrible to really grasp ever at all.It is only later, in solitude, in memory that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself - quite to one's surprise - in an entirely different world.

Still when I lost her, I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life.