There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.

a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm

That summer when she was eighteen, it seemed anything could happen, anything at all.

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.

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

Philip Glass, like [Virginia] Woolf, is more interested in that which continues than he is in that which begins, climaxes, and ends... Glass and Woolf have both broken out of the traditional realm of the story, whether literary or musical, in favor of something more meditative, less neatly delineated, and more true to life. For me, Glass [finds] in three repeated notes something of [a] rapture of sameness.

One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.