Pitch Dark (NYRB Classics)

One falls out of gradations of love and despair, after all, every few days, or months, or minutes.

we do not normally mistake progressions of weakness, the loss of the simple capacity to escape, for the onset of love.

What you’ve done, though, is to arrange your life so that all the things with a little joy or beauty in them were the things in which I had no part.

But what I’m afraid I’ve done is lost, lost you something, lost me something, lost us, by what I did not insist, a possibility.

When you marry, the great Spanish scholar said to his seminar, late one afternoon in spring, make sure your lives are different enough so that you have something to tell each other in the evening.