We looked at each other. And it occurred to me that despite his faults, which were numerous and spectacular, the reason I’d liked Boris and felt happy around him from almost the moment I’d met him was that he was never afraid. You didn’t meet many people who moved freely through the world with such a vigorous contempt for it and at the same time such oddball and unthwartable faith in what, in childhood, he had liked to call “the Planet of Earth.

Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well.

Even if it meant that she had failed, she was glad. And if what she'd wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she'd known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway.

I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.

Well, I do have some maiden aunts that are not quite like the aunts in the book, but I definitely do have a couple of them, and a couple of old aunties.