Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary physicality had also received the keys to an unbearable solitude. It was the coefficient of their beauty, the price they had to pay.

One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.

I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.

My attraction to story is a ceaseless current that runs through the center of me. My inexhaustible ardor for reading seems connected to my hunger for storylines that show up in both books and in the great tumbling chaos of life.

Saints make wonderful grandfathers and lousy husbands.

I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.

I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.