It takes too much imagination to see the sorrows of people we take for happy. Their real battles take place, like those of the stars, in some realm of light imperceptible to the human eye. It is a feat of the mind to guess another's heart.

It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing, to waste one's life for love.

A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we're married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that's why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he's dead.

The possibilities. Is there any greater pain to know what could be, and yet be powerless to make it be?

When I meet a woman whose energy falters at the first barrier,she seems to fade beside my mother.

I love going to writers' colonies in pastoral settings where there's nothing to do, but either walk around or read a book or work on your book.

It may be a childish torment, but we do not get to choose our demons.