“Light is good company, when alone; I took my comfort where I found it, and the warmest yellow bulb in the living-room lamp had become a kind of radiant babysitter all its own.”

With my hand in his, I looked at all the apartment buildings with rushes of love, peering in the wide streetside windows that revealed living rooms painted in dark burgandies and matte reds.

I don’t think so, I don’t agree. The most unbearable thing I think by far, she said, is hope.

The writing I tend to think of as ‘good’ is good because it’s mysterious.

While she cut the mushrooms, she cried more than she had at the grave.

You’re the perfect girl’, he said, rubbing his chin. ‘You expect nothing.

He was also removing all traces of any tiny leftover parts, and suddenly a ritual which I’d always found incestuous and gross seemed to me more like a desperate act on Joseph’s part to get out, to leave, to extract every little last remnant and bring it into open air.

It is so often surprising, who rescues you at your lowest moments.

I felt the crumpled paper that had taken the place of my lungs expand as if released from a fist.

Kissing George was a little like rolling in caramel after spending years surviving off rice sticks.

The stories themselves haunt, they stick around, they linger, inhabiting a little corner of the reader’s brain and resurfacing to evoke mystery or sadness or longing.

I am the drying meadow; you the unspoken apology; he is the fluctuating distance between mother and son.

The wine glasses are empty except for that one undrinkable red spot at the bottom.

Large meadows are lovely for picnics and romping, but they are for the lighter feelings. Meadows do not make me want to write.

But the sky is interesting, it changes all the time.

I could feel the tears beginning to collect in my throat again, but I pushed them apart, away from each other. Tears are only a threat in groups.

If everything kept to its normal progression, we would live with the sadness-cry and then walk-but what really breaks us cleanest are the losses that happen out of order.