He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life.

I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.

I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.

As soon as a man and woman of almost any age are alone together within four walls it is assumed that anything may happen. Spontaneous combustion, instant fornication, triumph of the senses. What possibilities men and women must see in each other to infer such dangers. Or, believing in the dangers, how often they must think about the possibilities.

Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.

I began to understand that there were certain talkers - certain girls - whom people liked to listen to, not because of what they, the girls, had to say, but because of the delight they took in saying it. A delight in themselves, a shine on their faces, a conviction that whatever they were telling about was remarkable and that they themselves could not help but give pleasure. There might be other people - people like me - who didn't concede this, but that was their loss. And people like me would never be the audience these girls were after, anyway.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.