Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together.

lonely people are always up in the middle of the night.

Perhaps that is what it means to be a father - to teach your child to live without you.

I wished to punish her for her intolerable stoicism, which made it impossible for me to ever be truly needed by her in the most profound ways a person can need another, a need that often goes by the name of love.

I read like an animal. I read under the covers, I read lying in the grass, I read at the dinner table. While other people were talking to me, I read.

A couple months after my heart attack, fifty-seven years after I'd given it up, I started to write again. I did it for myself alone, not for anyone else, and that was the difference. It didn't matter if I found the words, and more than that, I knew it would be impossible to find the right ones.

She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.