Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.

If I had a camera,' I said, 'I'd take a picture of you every day. That way I'd remember how you looked every single day of your life.

That's what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I'm not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.

Her kiss was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.

When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, Leo Gursky is survived by an apartment full of shit

He had slept next to her for thirty-six years, and the mattress felt different without her weight, however slight, and without the rhythm of her breath the dark had no measure. There were times he woke feeling cold from the lack of the heat that once came from between her thighs and behind her knees. He might have even called her, if he could have momentarily forgotten that he already knew everything she could possibly say.

These things are lost to oblivion like so much about so many who are born and die without anyone taking the time to write it all down. That Litvinoff had a wife who was so devoted is, to be frank, the only reason anyone knows anything about him at all.

When you're young, you think it's going to be solved by love. But it never is. Being close-as close as you can get-to another person only makes it clear the impassable distance between you.

...during the first moments of sadness that seemed to slip in through the open window without our noticing, disturbing the rarefied atmosphere that comes with the beginning of love...