Discovering, for example, that as witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. [p. 65]

Perhaps the world progresses not by maturing, but by being in a permanent state of adolescence, of thrilled discovery.

I remember laughing with relief that the same old adolescent boredom goes on from generation to generation. ...the words took me back to my own years of stagnancy, and that terrible waiting for life to begin. [p. 68]

You lose the world for a glance? Of course you do. That is what the world is for: to lose under the right circunstances.

I'm interested in such things as the difference between how we perceive the world and what the world turns out to be. The difference is between the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. There is a wonderful Russian saying, which I use as the epigraph of one of my novels, which goes, He lies like an eyewitness. Which is very sly, clever and true.

You put together two people who have not been put together before; and sometimes the world is changed, sometimes not. They may crash and burn, or burn and crash. But sometimes, something new is made, and then the world is changed. Together, in that first exaltation, that first roaring sense of uplift, they are greater than their two separate selves. Together, they see further, and they see more clearly.

A couple's first task, it has always seemed to me, is to solve the problem of breakfast; if this can be worked out amicably, most other difficulties can too.