“Even her name seemed empty, as though it had detached itself from her and was floating untethered in his mind. How am I supposed to live without you? It was not a matter of the body; his body would carry on as usual. The problem was located in the word how: he would live, but without Elspeth the flavour, the manner, the method of living were lost to him. He would have to relearn solitude.”

“The Garden Under Snow "Now the garden is under snow a blank page our footprints write onclare who was never minebut always belonged to herselfSleeping Beautya crystalline blanketthis is her springthis is her sleeping/awakeningshe is waitingeverything is waitingthe improbable shapes of rootsmy babyher facea garden, waiting.”

“[Who are the artists you admire, Surrealist or otherwise?]Remedios Varo, Max Ernst, Charlotte Salomon, Goya, Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley is not so much about the impossible as he is about freaks and deformities, but those are interesting to me too.”

“It's terrific, Clare," Henry says, and we stare at each other, and I think, "Don't leave me.”

“Clare, I want to tell you, again, I love you. Our love has been the thread through the labyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine that I could ever trust. Tonight I feel that my love for you has more density in this world than I do, myself: as though it could linger on after me and surround you, keep you, hold you.”

“Why do you have a cigarette lighter in your glove compartment?" her husband, Jack, asked her. "I'm bored with knitting. I've taken up arson”

“He was not in the house. He did not come back that night. Days went by, and at last she understood that he would not return at all.”

“He would say her name over and over until it devolved into meaningless sounds - mah REI kuh, mah REI kuh - it became an entry in a dictionary of loneliness.”

“Each spine was an encapsulated memory, each book represented hours, days of pleasure, of immersion into words.”

“You're my phantom limb, Mouse. I keep looking for you. I forget. I feel stupid, Mouse. Haunt me, find me, come back from wherever you are. Be with me.”

“That is what madness is, isn't it? All the wheels fly off the bus and things don't make sense any more. Or rather, they do, but it's not a kind of sense anyone else can understand.”