The last sentence of Little Dorrit: 

They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar.

A sentence late in The Waves:

It is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams.

I read both of these sentences yesterday, and both echoed in my chest. But now that I write them side by side I also see that they are the same. The streets, the people. Memory and love. The uproar. The strange. Separation and immersion.

And then the use of punctuation: so individual to each novelist, so perfectly placed.

I think about why I love books so much, why I reread with such stubborn dedication. These recognitions are part of it. The swift interlacing of craft with perception. The common humanity. I linger at the street corner, in sunshine and shade. Arm in arm, Charles and Virginia nod to me as they pass by.