Stories last longer: but only by becoming only stories.
Everybody grows up by leaps, and not by a steady climb like a mountaineer.
After many trials the God and his love end happily – tho’ not all remember this conclusion – which is less memorable than the moment when everything was lost. Happy endings are all alike; disasters may be unique.
There was after all no mystery in the end of love, no mystery but the mystery of love itself, which was large certainly but as real as grass, as natural and unaccountable as bloom and branch and their growth.
Learning to decipher words had only added to the pleasures of holding spines and turning pages, measuring the journey to the end with a thumb-riffle, poring over frontispieces. Books! Opening with a crackle of old glue, releasing perfume; closing with a solid thump.
God, he thought, her eyes are so bright, flashing, deep, full of promise, all those things eyes are in books but never are in life, and she was his.
The universe is Time’s body.
The further in you go, the bigger it gets.
The things that make us happy make us wise.
It occurred to him that seeing a woman’s child is like seeing a woman naked, in the way it changes how her face looks to you, how her face becomes less the whole story.