In everyone's life there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken against their will.

Every mother can easily imagine losing a child. Motherhood is always half loss anyway. The three-year-old is lost at five, the five-year-old at nine. We consort with ghosts, even as we sit and eat with, scold and kiss, their current corporeal forms. We speak to people who have vanished and, when they answer us, they do the same. Naturally, the information in these speeches is garbled in the translation.

It was the marriage that was important; Jane Austen rarely even bothered to write about the wedding.

Arriving late was a way of saying that your own time was more valuable than the time of the person who waited for you.

Pheromones are Earth's primordial idiom.

You've done so many things and read so many books. Do you still believe in happy endings?" "Oh my Lord, yes." Bernadette's hands were pressed against each other like a book, like a prayer. "I guess I would. I've had about a hundred of them.

When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy. Even their smaller sorrows will last only for as long as you can take out a book.