Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn't seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.

In the sheltered simplicity of the first days after a baby is born, one sees again the magical closed circle, the miraculous sense of two people existing only for each other.

When each partner loves so completely that he has forgotten to ask himself whether or not he is loved in return; when he only knows that he loves and is moving to its music--then, and then only are two people able to dance perfectly in tune to the same rhythm.

Fame is a kind of death because it arrests life around the person in the public eye.

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.

The best marriages, like the best lives, were both happy and unhappy. There was even a kind of necessary tension, a certain tautness between the partners that gave the marriage strength, like the tautness of a full sail. You went forward on it.

Perhaps I am a bear, or some hibernating animal underneath, for the instinct to be half asleep all winter is so strong in me.