There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined.

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

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

People are more than you think they are. And they're less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.

This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.

I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

He wanted to tell her that he was inspired and vigilant and recklessly alone, that his body contained his unsteady heart and something else, something he felt but could not describe: porous and spiky, shifting with flecks of thought, with urge and memory; salted with brightness, flickerings of white and green and pale gold; something that loved stars because it was made of the same substance.