And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.

I sit watching the brown oceanic waves of dry country rising into the foothills and I weep monotonously, seasickly. Life is not like the dim ironic stories I like to read, it is like a daytime serial on television. The banality will make you weep as much as anything else.

She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements.

I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.

When I told him on the phone that after all you and I would not be getting married, he said "Oh-oh. Do you think you'll ever manage to get another one?" If I'd objected to his saying that he would naturally have said it was a joke. And it was a joke. I have not managed to get another one but perhaps have not been in the best condition to try.

As a matter of fact she does not know to this day if those words were spoken, or if he only caught her, wound his arms around her, held her so tightly, with such continual, changing pressures that it seemed more than two arms were needed, that she was surrounded by him, his body strong and light, demanding and renouncing all at once, as if he was telling her she was wrong to give up on him, everything was possible, but then again that she was not wrong, he meant to stam himself on her and go.

You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.