So many words get lost. They leave the mouthand lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days you can hear their chorus rushing past.

When I was with Yoav, everything in me that had been sitting stood up. He had a way of looking at me with a kind of unabashed directness that made me shiver. It's something amazing to feel that for the first time someone is seeing you as you really are, not as they wish you, or you wish yourself, to be.

One is always changing. I don't want to write the same book and I couldn't, because I'm a different person.

...larger than life...I've never understood that expression. What's larger than life?

There are moments when a kind of clarity comes over you, and suddenly you can see through walls to another dimension that you'd forgotten or chosen to ignore in order to continue living with the various illusions that make life, particularily life with other people, possible.

I read differently now, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time. (245)

The unique thing that literature provides is to be able to step so fully into another situation and condition.