The moment had passed, the door between the lives we could have led and the lives we led had shut in our faces.

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

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.

She was gone, and all that was left was the space you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence. For a long time, it remained hollow. Years, maybe. And when at last it was filled again, you knew that the new love you felt for a woman would have been impossible without Alma. If it weren't for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it.

To touch and feel each thing in the world, to know it by sight and by name, and then to know it with your eyes closed so that when something is gone, it can be recognized by the shape of its absence. So that you can continue to possess the lost, because absence is the only constant thing. Because you can get free of everything except the space where things have been.

Life in general in my experience gets deeper and deeper, more and more profound, more and more complex, the older one gets.

I do realize that the reader needs some form of resolution. Sometimes I think of it almost like writing a musical score where things have to harmonize and certain lines have to come to a close.