“I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now?”

“How did she do it, I'd always wondered. Dancing with Q., I understood. Once in a while the pain falls asleep on the job, and the experienced sufferer knows enough to seize such moments swiftly and without thought - for when we realize we're actually dancing, the jolt of joy wakens the pain.Laura Acosta”

“Head held high and lips parted, she breathed in the music, sending it through her torso and arms and legs the way the Tai Chi teacher told us to breath the air, transforming it into energy, motion. Dancing is the body's song, and Bess sang.”

“Reading teaches us receptivity....It teaches us to receive, in stillness and attentiveness, a voice possessed temporarily, on loan....And as we grow accustomed to receiving books in stillness and attentiveness, so we can grow to receive the world, also possessed temporarily.”

“My head aches, my eyes burn, my arms and legs have given up, and my face in the mirror has a grayish cast. The bed, across the room, calls in its unmistakable lover's croon, Come to me, come, only I can make you truly happy, oh, how happy I'll make you, don't resist, remember how you moan with pleasure the instant we touch.....Laura Acosta”

“Does being true to one's self mean offering the literal truth or the truth that should have been, the truth of the image of one's self? It hardly matters by this time. By this time the border between seeing straight on and seeing round the corners of solid objects, between the world as smooth and coherent and the world as dissociated skinless particle, is thoroughly blurred. No longer a case of double vision, but of two separate eyes whose separate visions - what happened and what might have happened - come together in what we call the past, which we see with hindsight. Memory is revision. I have just destroyed another piece of my past, to tell a story.”

“Parables, yes. We here are to lead life with woe. Tasting bitter.the Tai Chi instructor”

“The stillness and stasis of bed are the perfect opposite of travel: inertia is what I've come to consider the default mode, existentially and electronically speaking. Bed, its utter inactivity, offers a glimpse of eternity, without the drawback of being dead.”

“How are we to spend our lives, anyway? That is the real question. We read to seek the answer, and the search itself--the task of a lifetime--becomes the answer.”

“I have managed not to finish certain books. With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more than anything else, readers are thrill-seekers, though I don't read thrillers, not the kind sold under that label, anyway. They don't thrill; only language thrills.”

“I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now?”