I know that attaching memories to books may be going out of the world, but while it lasts, it's a strong record of your life.

You begin always knowing nothing. You remain forever an amateur, a first timer.

The only way we know it's true is that we both dreamed it. That's what reality is. It's a dream everyone has together.

Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup? It's impossible to imagine my father, who in my experience was aroused mainly by the lowering of interest rates, suffering the acute, adolescent passions of the flesh.

All of a sudden America wasn't about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was about something that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had happened since. Instead of everything that was happening now!

So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.

There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.