Satin and lace and brown velvet and the faint odor of violets. That was all which was left to him of his love.

My father represented authority, which meant—to me—that he could not also represent understanding.

What we refer to confidently as memory is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.

The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters

His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope.

I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn’t have gone through and couldn’t get back to the place I hadn’t meant to leave.

Who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.