What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. And there it is... It was death. I chose life.

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

What I want to say is that I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. Everything is gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

We’d hoped for love of a different kind, love that knew and forgave our human frailty but did not miniaturize our grander ideas of ourselves.

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.

What do you do when you're no longer the hero of your own story?

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