In love there are no vacations. No such thing. Love has to be lived fully with its boredom and all that.

Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.

When you wept it was just over yourself and not because of the marvelous impossibility of reaching her through the difference that separates you.

Drinking isn't necessarily the same as wanting to die. But you can't drink without thinking you're killing yourself.

For that's what a woman, a mother wants - to teach her children to take an interest in life. She knows it's safer for them to be interested in other people's happiness than to believe in their own.

Their voices reach out into the empty yard, plunge deep into the hills, go right through the heart.

The outrage was on the scale of God. My younger brother was immortal and they hadn't noticed. Immortality had been concealed in my brother's body while he was alive, and we hadn't noticed that it dwelt there. Now my brother's body was dead, and immortality with it. ... And the error, the outrage, filled the whole universe.