“We can only go to the limits of ourselves. Anything more and we give too much away. Then we're not good for anyone.”

“Denys had a way of seeing everything as if he knew it would never be there exactly the same again. He understood how nothing ever holds still for us, or should. The trick is learning to take things as they come and fully, too, with no resistence or fear, not trying to grip them too tightly or make them bend.”

“Sometimes when you're hurting, it helps to throw yourself at something that will take your weight.”

“We can only go to the limits of ourselves. Anything more and we give too much away. Then we're not good for anyone.”

“When he craved contact, he stopped in to visit the Cézannes and Monets at the Musée du Luxembourg, believing they had already done what he was striving for—distilling places and people and objects to their essential qualities.”

“They love me like a pack of wolves.Ernest”

“There are some who said I should have fought harder or longer than I did for my marriage, but in the end fighting for love that was already gone felt like trying to live in the ruins of a lost city.”

“He was a humorist, and everyone knew the funny writers were the most serious sort under their skins.”

“I preferred to look at the sea, which said nothing and never made you feel alone.”

“We knew what we had and what it meant, and though so much had happened since for both of us, there was nothing like those years in Paris, after the war. Life was painfully pure and simple and good, and I believed Ernest was his best self then. I got the very best of him. We got the best of each other.”

“They’d scared me and had me thinking about what it meant to be really strong, on my own terms—not just fit and brown from the sun, not just flexible and accommodating.”