How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten.

You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.

Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.

Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.

There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.

That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed.

There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they've ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything to others, but lose nothing of yourself.