He insists on a version of you that is funnier, stranger, more eccentric and prfound thatn you suspect yourself to be--capable of doing more good and more harm in the world than you've ever imagined--it is all but impossible not to believe, at least in his presence and a while after you've left him, that he alone sees through your essence, weighs your true qualities . . . and appreciates you more fully than anyone else ever has.

The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.

If she were religious, she would call it the soul. It is more than the sum of her intellect and her emotions, more than the sum of her experiences, though it runs like veins of brilliant metal through all three. It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance

You grow weary of being treated as the enemy simply because you are not young anymore; because you dress unexceptionally.

Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself.

What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy's other half.

That is what we do. That is what people do. They stay alive for each other.