Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time.

I like to think that it isn't weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair.

I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a little sorrowful that I'll never know the man, or any man of such warm intelligence.

She loved him, though not at this particular moment.

This is how the entire course of a life can be changed - by doing nothing.

These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as B.C. and A.D. Before prison, before the war, before the sight of a corpse became a banality.

Writers are said to have superstitions and little rituals. Readers have them too.