“There has always been a sliver of panic in him, deeply buried, when it comes to his daughter: a fear that he is no good as a father, that he is doing everything wrong. That he never quite understood the rules. …There is pride, too, though–pride that he has done it alone. That his daughter is so curious, so resilient. There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing. That’s how it feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing her hair: as though his love for his daughter will outstrip the limits of his body. The walls could fall away, even the whole city, and the brightness of that feeling would not wane.”

“Did time move forward, through people, or did people move through it, like clouds across the sky?”

“Posters go up in the market, on tree trunks in the Place Chateaubriand. Voluntary surrender of firearms. Anyone who does not cooperate will be shot.”

“I wasn't trying to reach England. Or Paris. I thought that if I made the broadcast powerful enough, my brother would hear me. That I could bring him some peace, protect him as he had always protected me.""You'd play your brother's own voice to him? After he died?""And Debussy.""Did he ever talk back?"The attic ticks. What ghosts sidle along the walls right now, trying to overhear? She can almost taste her great-uncle's fright in the air. "No," he says. "He never did.”

“All morning I lay down sentences, erase them, and try new ones. Soon enough, when things go well, the world around me dwindles: the sky out the window, the furious calm of the big umbrella pine ten feet away, the smell of dust falling onto the hot bulb in the lamp. That's the miracle of writing, the place you try to find--when the room, your body, and even time itself cooperate in a vanishing act.”

“Rome is a broken mirror, the falling straps of a dress, a puzzle of astonishing complexity. It is an iceberg floating below our terrace, all its ballasts hidden beneath the surface.”

“Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.”

“You must never stop believing. That’s the most important thing.”

“Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.”

“The stars were so many and so white they looked like chips of ice, hammered through the fabric of the sky.”

“Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitary”