“The summer following the winter that my mother took off into something called Women’s Land for what I could only guess would be all eternity.”

Being a man is bullshit; maybe trying to be a man had been the problem all along. At a certain point you just have to trust someone. Even if it’s only yourself.

We have learned by now that our beauty does not count as a possession. The only thing we truly own is our legend.

My father decided that there was no choice but for him to quit his despised job and take me and my brother to the beach for at least the entire summer and possibly longer.

We are renters and borrowers and, in the end, only thieves.

The world rushes through us. We are peaceful. We are as deep and black as space. Staring up at the stars, we see only our own image reflected back at us. We are infinite and we are ravenous.

We number our days and divide our seasons. We endlessly define what it is to be in love. When in truth, spring blurs into summer and always has, long before that line was ever drawn.

Summer was felt a little more; in autumn I began to fall. When winter came with all its white, you were mine to kiss goodnight.

Time always seems long to the child who is waiting – for Christmas, for next summer, for becoming a grownup: long also when he surrenders his whole soul to each moment of a happy day.

The mother and father osprey stay together. It’s a monogamous relationship. And every summer they raise a new brood of children.

A summary of every Jewish holiday: They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat!

I go to live in Maine for the summer. Without computer, and without the telephone service we are mercifully without the faxes and e-mails.

There was once a great actor named George C. Scott. He was on stage in the Delacourt Theater in Central Park, where they do Shakespeare every summer, and he was playing Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.

and I was listening. I started singing, warmer than a summer night, at seven or eight years old.