Silly humans. Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.

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.

Accept that, like many men, you have a streak of the homoerotic in you. Why would you, why would anyone, want to be that straight?

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

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.

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

we become the stories we tell ourselves