Doesn’t part of the awe that fills us when we confront the unknown come from understanding that, should it at last flood into us and become known, we would be altered?

He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard.

If they have to be named after anything at all, why can’t it be things, which have more permanence, like the sky or the sea, or even ideas, which never really die, not even bad ones?

If it weren’t for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it.

My mother was the force around which our world turned. Unlike our father, who spent his life in the clouds, my mother was propelled through the universe by the brute force of reason. She was the judge in all of our arguments. One disapproving word from her was enough to send us off to hide in a corner, where we would cry and fantasize our own martyrdom. And yet. One kiss could restore us to princedom. Without her, our lives would dissolve into chaos.

And if the man who once upon a time had been a boy who promised he’d never fall in love with another girl as long as he lived kept his promise, it wasn’t because he was stubborn or even loyal. He couldn’t help it.

Once or twice a year I attended the English Romantic conferences held throughout Europe, brief gatherings perhaps not dissimilar in feeling for the participants than the feeling Jews have when they get off the plane in Israel: the relief of at last being surrounded on all sides by your own kind – the relief and the horror.

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.

When we went into the ocean, I watched his body as he dove into the waves, and it gave me a feeling in my stomach that wasn’t an ache but something different.

I though, So this is how they send the angel. Stalled at the age when she loved you most.