I walked down my snow covered street. Out of habit I turned and checked for my footsteps. When I arrived at my building I looked for my name on the buzzers. And because I know that sometimes I see things that aren't there, after dinner I called Information to ask if I was listed.(25)

And if the man who once upon a time had been a boy who promised he'd never fall in love with another girl as long as he lived kept his promise, it wasn't because he was stubborn or even loyal. He couldn't help it.

In one's youth, one has tremendous access to one's feelings. And as one gets older, some of those feelings kind of drift away. But so much more happens to you. There's more at stake in life.

If the book is a mystery to its author as she's writing, inevitably it's going to be a mystery to the reader as he or she reads it.

At the end, all that's left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that's why I've never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that's why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived.

And it's like some tiny nothing that sets off a natural disaster halfway across the world, only this was the opposite of disaster, how by accident she saved me with that thoughtless act of grace, and she never knew, and how that, too, is the part of the history of love.

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.