"Perhaps the relevant truth - and it's one whose existence was apparent to my wife, and I'm sure to much of the world, long before it became apparent to me - is that we all find ourselves in temporary current and that unless you're paying attention you'll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you into deep trouble."
"An
ancient discovery was now mine to make: to leave is to take nothing less than a mortal action.""Smugness, however, requires a certain reflectiveness, which requires perspective, which requires distance; and we, or certainly I, didn't look upon our circumstances from the observatory offered by a disposition to the more spatial emotions - those feelings, of regret or gratitude or relief, say, that make reference to situations removed from one's own. It didn't seem to me, for example, that I had dodged a bullet, perhaps because I had no real idea what a bullet was. I was young. I was not much extracted from the innocence in which the benevolent but fraudulent world conspires to place us as children."
"I was thinking of the miserable apprehension we have of even those existences that matter most to us. To witness a life, even in love - even with a camera - was to witness a monstrous crime without noticing the particulars required for justice."
"Strange, how such a moment grows in value over a marriage's course. We gratefully pocket each of them, these sidewalk pennies, and run with them to the bank as if creditors were banging on the door. Which they are, one comes to realize."
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