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

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.

For me, the historical and genealogical library is the one I use. I'm working on, I'll say, it's a time travel novel. I haven't written very much of it. That's the dirty secret of the Cullman center: The writers don't write their fiction there, they just do their research.

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

How hollow to have no secrets left; you shake yourself and nothing rattles. You're boneless as an anemone.

We are each the love of someone's life.

So tell me gentleman, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman.