Bedtime rituals for children ease the way to the elsewhere of slumber - teeth brushing and pajamas, the voice of a parent reading, the feel and smell of the old blanket or toy, the nightlight glowing in a corner.

That night as I lay in bed, I thought of several things I could have said and mourned the fact that my wit usually bloomed late, peaking when it no longer mattered, during the solitary hours close to midnight.

There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and dreams without help.

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

Every one of us is prone to implicit sexual prejudices, including women.

Widowers marry again because it makes their lives easier. Widows often don't, because it makes their lives harder. [p. 61]

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.