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.

I would ... go up to the mailbox and sit in the grass, waiting. ... Till it came to me one day there were women doing this with their lives, all over. There were women just waiting and waiting by mailboxes for one letter or another. I imagined me making this journey day after day and year after year, and my hair starting to go gray, and I thought, I was never made to go on like that. ... If there were woman all through life waiting, and women busy and not waiting, I knew which I had to be.

Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing.

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

Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later.

What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it".

It’s just life. You can’t beat life.