He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into.

I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide - sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself.

We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do-we do it all the time.

For we did makeup. But we didn't forgive each other. And we didn't take steps. And it got to be too late and we saw that each of us had invested too much in being in the right and we walked away and it was a relief.

The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn't fail.

The unhappiest moment I could never tell you. All our fights blend into each other and are in fact re-enactments of the same fight, in which we punish each other--I with words, Hugh with silence--for being each other. We never needed any more than that.

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