The accolades, just like the scrapes and bruises, fade in the end, and all you're left with is your ambition.

He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard [...]. How could he have forgotten what he had always known: there is no match for the silence of God.

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.

How was it possible to wake up every day and be recognizable to another when so often one was barely recognizable to oneself?

I'm the opposite of someone like David Grossman, who knows how his characters walk, and how they smell. I don't allow myself to imagine what mine look like at all. My sense of them comes from the inside. They remain, by necessity, physically vague in my mind.

Then he almost but didn't say the two sentence he'd been meaning to say for years: part of me is made of glass, and also, I love you

The truth is that she told me she couldn't love me. When she said goodbye, she was saying goodbye forever. And yet. I made myself forget. I don't know why. I keep asking myself. But I did.