“Reading Chekhov, I felt not happy, exactly, but as close to happiness as I knew I was likely to come. And it occurred to me that this was the pleasure and mystery of reading, as well as the answer to those who say that books will disappear. For now, books are still the best way of taking great art and its consolations along with us on a bus.”

“I know a lot of Eastern Europeans, and because of what they have been through and what they have seen, they have an attitude where they are not easily fooled.”

“She emerges from the station directly across from the restaurant. And she's right on time. Like magic, Sonya thinks, briefly saddened to realize that this is what magic means now: not being late, not getting lost on the subway. Whatever happened to the fairy godmothers, to all those bunnies yanked out of hats?”

“The mystery of death, the riddle of how you could speak to someone and see them every day and then never again, was so impossible to fathom that of course we kept trying to figure it out, even when we were unconscious.”

“Every song may be someone's personal implement of torture.”

“And there was that trick he did with time, making it speed up when we were together and drag til I saw him again.”

“I waited for dawn, but only because I had forgotten how hard mornings were. For a second I'd be normal. Then came the dim awareness of something off, out of place. Then the truth came crashing down and that was it for the rest of the day. Sunlight was reproof. Shouldn't I feel better than I had in the dead of night.”

“He claimed to be a Marxist, the only one of his claims I believed. He had that Marxist passion for oysters and good Sancerre, and that Marxist paralysis when the waiter brought the check. Already it’s obvious how much the Communists got wrong, overbetting on human high-mindedness, lowballing human desire.”

“But love is strange, as they used to say at the Chameleon Club. Even those of us who value intelligence over appearance have discovered, to our chagrin, that a high IQ doesn't necessarily translate into kindness or even conscience.”

“Throughout her life, she behaved as if she had never heard anyone suggest that a woman couldn't do entirely as she pleased.”

“Like seeing a photograph of yourself as a child, encountering handwriting that you know was once yours but that now seems only dimly familiar can inspire a confrontation with the mystery of time.”