he could transform the barest incident into a thing of curve and contour.

Your life on earth will be, as always, the interval between two significant glances in a mundane mirror.

All I think of ever is that I love you.

Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone's away. There's something very sensuous about it - overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.

An unread book is just a block of paper.

He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was.