If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I cant go on spoiling your lif… - Michael Cunningham

I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

She is, above all else, tired; she wants more than anything to return to her bed and her book. The world, this world, feels suddenly stunned and stunted, far from everything.

Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself.

"Oh, pride, pride. I was so wrong. It defeated me. It simply proved insurmountable. There was so much, oh, far too much for me. I mean, there's the weather, there's the water and the land, there are the animals, and the buildings, and the past and the future, there's space, there's history. There's this thread or something caught between my teeth, there's the old woman across the way, did you notice she switched the donkey and the squirrel on her windowsill? And, of course, there's time. And place. And there's you, Mrs. D. I wanted to tell part of the story of part of you. Oh, I'd love to have done that."

"Richard. You wrote a whole book."

"But everything's left out of it, almost everything. And then I just stuck on a shock ending. Oh, now, I'm not looking for sympathy, really. We want so much, don't we?"

"Yes. I suppose we do."

"You kissed me beside a pond."

"Ten thousand years ago."

"It's still happening."