In twenty years I've never had a day when I didn't have to think about someone else's needs. And this means the writing has to be fitted around it.

Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?

Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again.

people who believe in miracles do not make much fuss when they actually encounter one

It must have meant something, though, that at this turn of my life I grabbed up a book. Because it was in books that I would find, for the next few years, my lovers. They were men, not boys. They were self-possessed and sardonic, with a ferocious streak in them, reserves of gloom.

One stroke of lightning does not have to lead anywhere, but to the next stroke of lightning.

His face contained for me all possibilities of fierceness and sweetness, pride and submissiveness, violence, self-containment. I never saw more in it than I had when I saw it first, because I saw everything then. The whole thing in him that I was going to love, and never catch or explain.