I try to see the whole woman,' Eddie said to Hannah. 'Of course I recognize that she's old, but there are photographs - or the equivalent of photographs in one's imagination of anyone's life. A whole life, I mean. I can picture her when she was much younger than I am - because there are always gestures and expressions that are ingrained, ageless. An old woman doesn't see herself as an old woman, and neither do I. I try to see her her whole life in her. There's something so moving about someone's whole life.

But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.

…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.

There was no manifestation of contemporary culture that did not indicate to my grandmother how steadfast was the nation's decline, how merciless our mental and moral deterioration, how swiftly all-embracing our final decadence. I never saw her read a book again; but she referred to books often - as if they were shrines and cathedrals of learning that television had plundered and then abandoned.

He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.

Half my life is an act of revision.

The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.