Sometimes I ask myself if writing novels is even respectable.

They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.

No matter that you anticipate a thing; you get so used to it as part of the future that its actuality, its arrival, its force and presence, startles you, takes you by surprise, as would a ghost suddenly appearing in the room wearing familiar perfume and boots.

I had never feared insomnia before--like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read?

Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.

[T]he normal and the everyday are often amazingly unstoppable, and what is unimaginable is the cessation of them. The world is resilient, and, no matter what interruptions occur, people so badly want to return to their lives and get on with them. A veneer of civilization descends quickly, like a shining rain. Dust is settled.

An agony. The exit like the entrance - but reserved. A palindrome: gut-tug.