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"Such a pleasure to read...nothing less than a triumph." - New York Times Book Review In this "captivating" ( Time Out New York ) novel, an aging author-now out of print and barely remembered by the literary world that once fleetingly embraced him-is courted by a brash young graduate... read more

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Quotes edit see section history

  • “He was preoccupied with the thought that at every point of the game there was at least one perfect move, one "brilliancy," which he could find if he pondered the position deeply enough.”
    Leonard Schiller
  • “That's how I feel now. About myself. I don't feel like an old man. I feel as it I'm still ripening. I feel as if I"m just starting to understand things. But what's the use of this ripeness? It doesn't nourish anything. it just disappears.”
    George Levin
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • The moments of beauty, the moments when you feel blessed, are only moments; but memory and imagination, treasuring them, can string them together like the delicate glories on the necklace her father had given her.
    Highlighted by 6 Kindle customers
  • The older you get, the harder it is to be concise. It's no longer adequate merely to say what you know; it's urgent to explain how you came to know it.
    Highlighted by 4 Kindle customers
  • You seize your freedom in a spirit of rebelliousness, exuberance, defiant joy. But to live that choice—over the weeks and months and years to come—requires different qualities. It requires that you turn hard, turn rigid. Because it isn't a choice that the world encourages, you have to wear a suit of armor to defend it.
    Highlighted by 4 Kindle customers
  • Love, during the middle years, is in great part a matter of accompanying your beloved through life's disasters.
    Highlighted by 4 Kindle customers
  • When most of the people you've loved are gone, you begin to let go.
    Highlighted by 4 Kindle customers
  • Sometimes, said Thoreau, you can date a new era in your life from the reading of a book.
    Highlighted by 3 Kindle customers
  • 'Sidney Hook—a philosopher about whom your friend Leonard Schiller undoubtedly has strong feelings, one way or the other—used to say that most of the difficult decisions in life don't involve right against wrong, but right against right. That's why life is tragic.
    Highlighted by 3 Kindle customers
  • 'That's how I feel now. About myself. I don't feel like an old man. I feel as if I'm still ripening. I feel as if I'm just starting to understand things. But what's the use of this ripeness? It doesn't give birth to anything. It doesn't nourish anything. It just disappears.'
    Highlighted by 3 Kindle customers
  • His daughter, even if the world began to show her its mildest face, would always be tangled in coils of unhappiness.
    Highlighted by 3 Kindle customers
  • the comet—to see it delicately stepping across the sky, trailing its long blue train. But as she waited, holding her lover's hand, she found herself thinking that she wouldn't mind if it never even appeared: the night was astonishing already, just as it was.
    Highlighted by 3 Kindle customers
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First Sentence edit see section history

Heather was wearing the wrong dress.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Brian Morton (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Harvest Books
Country: Add the country of publication.
Publication Date: 2007
ISBN: 0156033410
Page Count: 336

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