I looked like some cult-raised kid just rescued by local law enforcement, brought blinking from some basement stocked with firearms and powdered milk.

Even in some smoky post-catastrophe Manhattan, you could imagine him swaying genially at the door in the rags of his former uniform, the Barbours up in the apartment burning old National Geographics for warmth, living off gin and tinned crabmeat.

The problem (as I'd learned, repeatedly) was that thirty-six hours in, with your body in full revolt, and the remainder of your un-opiated life stretching out bleakly ahead of you like a prison corridor, you needed some fairly compelling reason to keep moving forward into darkness, rather than falling straight back into the gorgeous feather mattress you'd so foolishly abandoned.

To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole...

I was different, but it wasn't. As the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past.

Who was it said that coincidence was just God's way of remaining anonymous?

...beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.

A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don't get to choose our own hearts. We can't make ourselves want what's good for us or what's good for other people. We don't get to choose the people we are.

And as much as I'd like to believe there's a truth beyond illusion, I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond illusion. Because, between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.

“You'd be surprised...what small everyday things can lift us out of despair. But nobody can do it for you. You're the one who has to watch for the open door.” (Mrs. Swanson)

When we are sad...it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don't change.  (Hobie)

It was the secret no one told you, the thing you had to learn for yourself: viz. that in the antiques trade there was really no such thing as a “correct” price.   Objective value—list value—was meaningless.  If a customer came in clueless with money in hand (as most of them did) it didn't matter what the books said, what the experts said, what similar items at Christie's had recently gone for. An object—any object was worth whatever you could get somebody to pay for it. (Theo)

“Oh, Theo! Isn't he adorable? Kitsey unexpectantly thrusting a friend's newborn at me—me in all sincere horror leaping back as if from a lighted match.

What you want to live and be happy in this world is a woman who has her own life and lets you have yours.(Boris)

“Well—I have to say I personally have never drawn such a sharp line between ‘good' and ‘bad' as you. For me: that line is often false. The two are never disconnected. One can't exist without the other. As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how. But you—wrapped up in judgment, always regretting the past, cursing yourself, blaming yourself, asking ‘what if,' ‘what if.' ‘Life is cruel.' ‘I wish I had died instead of.' Well—think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no—hang on—this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can't get there any other way?”

“the world is much stranger than we know or can say. And I know how you think, or how you like to think, but maybe this is one instance where you can't boil down to pure ‘good' or pure ‘bad' like you always want to do—? Like, your two different piles? Bad over here, good over here? Maybe not quite so simple. Because—all the way driving here, driving all night, Christmas lights on the motorway and I'm not ashamed to tell you, I got choked up—because I was thinking, couldn't help it, about the Bible story—? you know, where the steward steals the widow's mite, but then the steward flees to far country and invests the mite wisely and brings back thousandfold cash to widow he stole from? And with joy she forgave him, and they killed the fatted calf, and made merry?” “I think that's maybe not all the same story.”

My eyes darted nervously around the living room. My mother's book ("Jane and Prudence", Barbara Pym) face-down on the back of the sofa.

The social workers ... took clipboards and pens from their briefcases ... Enrique signed his name with a flourish. "Can't promise anything," he said, clicking his pen and sticking it back in his pocket.

I lay awake in Welty's old room, his old reading glasses and fountain pens still in the desk drawers.