Talk—half-talk, phrases that had no need to be finished, abstractions, Chinese bells played on with cotton-tipped sticks, mock orange blossoms painted on porcelain. The muffled, close, half-talk of soft-fleshed women. The men she had embraced, and the women, all washing against the resonance of my memory. Sound within sound, scene within scene, woman within woman—like acid revealing an invisible script. One woman within another eternally, in a far-reaching procession, shattering my mind into fragments, into quarter tones which no orchestral baton can ever make whole again.

You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too.

Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.

Is devotion to others a cover for the hungers and the needs of the self, of which one is ashamed? I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not virtue. It was a disguise.

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.

We do not see the world as it is. We see the word as we are.

To think of him in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living.