This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.

I'll be looking at the moon, but I'll be seeing you.

What night gave Rafael was a formlessness in which everything had a purpose. As if darkness had a hidden musical language.

People don't write about kids; you have to give them a lot of freedom, and that causes anarchy and that causes farce.

Sleep is a prison for a boy who has friends to meet.

I promised to tell you how one falls in love.

Her father had taught her about hands. About a dog's paws. Whenever her father was alone with a dog in a house he would lean over and smell the skin at the base of its paw. This, he would say, as if coming away from a brandy snifter, is the greatest smell in the world! A bouquet! Great rumours of travel! She would pretend disgust, but the dog's paw was a wonder: the smell of it never suggested dirt. It's a cathedral! her father had said, so-and-so's garden, that field of grasses, a walk through cyclamen--a concentration of hints of all the paths the animal had taken during the day.