I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.

These days, Clarissa believes, you measure people first by their kindness and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes, of wit and intellect; everybody's little display of genius.

What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run.

Like the morning you walked out of that old house, when you were eighteen and I was, well, I had just turned nineteen, hadn't I? I was a nineteen-year-old and I was in love with Louis and I was in love with you, and I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful as the sight of you walking out a glass door in the early morning, still sleepy, in your underwear. Isn't it strange?

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

Insomniacs know better than anyone how it would be to haunt a house.

You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.