There was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible

Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.

New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not 'live' at Xanadu.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.

Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.

We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.

I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.