Vanish. Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her. Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes. Go back into the blue. I myself placed her ashes in the wall. I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six. I know what it is I am now experiencing. I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost. You may see nothing still to be lost. Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.

Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.