Does love always form, like a pearl, around the hardened bits of life?

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.

Perhaps love is a minor madness. And as with madness, it's unendurable alone. The one person who can relieve us is of course the sole person we cannot go to: the one we love. So instead we seek out allies, even among strangers and wives, fellow patients who, if they can't touch the edge of our particular sorrow, have felt something that cuts nearly as deep.

Some things are so impossible, so fantastic, that when they happen, you are not at all surprised. Their sheer impossibility has made you imagine them too many times in your head, and when you find yourself on that longed-for moonlit path, it seems unreal but still, somehow, familiar. You dreamed of it, of course; you know it like a memory.

Surely words are just the background music when passion pounces on a soul.

Despite all their fears, we ask very little of the ones who never loved us. We do not ask for sympathy or pain or compassion. We simply want to know why.

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.