a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm

But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another.

. . . he felt himself entering a moment so real he could only run toward it, shouting.

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.

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

I don't have any regrets, really, except that one. I wanted to write about you, about us, really. Do you know what I mean? I wanted to write about everything, the life we're having and the lives we might have had. I wanted to write about all the ways we might have died.