Sometimes it seems to me that all of life is a struggle to contain the natural impulses of the body and spirit, and that what we call character represents only the degree to which we are successful in this endeavor.

Is imagination dependent upon experience, or is experience influenced by imagination?

I have always been faithful to you if faithful means the experience against which everything else has been measured.

There are more experiences in life than you’d think for which there are no words.

And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room.

Reunions are always fraught with awkward tensions - the necessity to account for oneself; the attempt to find, through memories, an ember of the old emotions.

Sydney discovers that she minds the loss of her mourning. When she grieved, she felt herself to be intimately connected to Daniel. But with each passing day, he floats away from her. When she thinks about him now, it is more as a lost possibility than as a man. She has forgotten his breath, his musculature.