But history is a faithless teller whose cruel recourse to hindsight makes fools of its actors.

My fingers positively itched to drift at length along their spines, to arrive at one whose lure I could not pass, to pluck it down, to inch it open, then to close my eyes and inhale the soul-sparking scent of old and literate dust.

The world was an awfully large place and it wasn't easy to find a person who'd gone missing sixty years earlier, even if that person was oneself.

Had any poet adequately described the wretched ugliness of a loved one turned inside out with grief?

She hadn't wanted to be loved carefully, only well.

Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down, before they knew their endings.

I'm good with words, but not the spoken kind; I've often thought what a marvelous thing it would be if I could only conduct relationships on paper.