She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty which a lifetime havit had taught her to ignore.

He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.

No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.

When its gone, you'll know what a gift love was. you'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.

She loved him, though not at this particular moment.

I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who's a genius on his best days).

Was everyone else really as alive as she was?...If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was.