Her cake is a failure, but she is loved anyway. She is loved, she thinks, in more or less the way the gifts will be appreciated: because they have been given with good intentions , because they exist, because they are part of a world in which one wants what one gets.

There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.

Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.

Please, God, send me something to adore.

a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm

She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life, Leonard.