If I had a camera,' I said, 'I'd take a picture of you every day. That way I'd remember how you looked every single day of your life.

Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person's silence.

The truth was I'd given up waiting long ago. The moment had passed, the door between the lives we could have led and the lives we led had shut in our faces. Or better to say, in my face. Grammar of my life: as a rule of thumb, wherever there appears a plural, correct for singular. Should I ever let slip a royal We, put me out of my misery with a swift blow to the head.

We search for patterns, you see, only to find where the patterns break. And it’s there, in that fissure, that we pitch our tents and wait.

Part of the work of writing a novel is to uncover the symmetries or connections that make it whole, which might not reveal itself at first.

I’ve always liked the feeling of traveling light; there is something in me that wants to feel I could leave wherever I am, at any time, without any effort. The idea of being weighed down made me uneasy, as if I lived on the surface of a frozen lake and each new trapping of domestic life - a pot, a chair, a lamp - threatened to be the thing that sent me through the ice.

Don’t you see?” I said. “He could change every detail, but he couldn’t change her.” “But why?” His obtuseness frustrated me. “Because he was in love with her!” I said. “Because, to him, she was the only thing that was real.