But where the eluders have it wrong is that quantifiability doesn’t make human life any less remarkable, or even (this is counterintuitive, I know) less mysterious—any more than identifying the rhyme scheme in a poem devalues the poem itself. The opposite! Mysteries that are destroyed by measurement were never truly mysterious; only our ignorance

She struggles to believe that Piers is as real as she is—as full of thoughts and memories and feelings.

I see now that the place I’ve been yearning for is my own imagination.

a symbiosis that made her old life obsolete, had been temporary.

Roxy marvels at the deep absorption of the players, who never seem impatient. It’s as if the rest of life has slowed to match the pace of the game.

I’m itching to get to my medical clinic, where there’s always more to do and it always matters. But I’ve learned to resist that impulse.

She had always been observant, but now her watchfulness was exaggerated to the point of aberration, like a distended limb.

I understood with sudden clarity that doing the right thing—being right—gets you nothing in this world. It’s the sinners everyone loves: the flailers, the scramblers, the bumblers. There was nothing sexy about getting it right the first time.

Alone by choice on Saturday nights, writing by an open window in his studio apartment, Gregory had experienced a kind of euphoria: a swelling, bursting, yearning hunger that had something in common with lust but included everyone, from the revelers outside his window to the carousers down the hall. He was where he wanted to be, and needed nothing