The closest thing to being cared for is to care for someone else.

There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.

But all the time-no matter what she was doing-there was music.

The trouble with me is that for a long time I have just been an I person. All people belong to a We except me. Not to belong to a We makes you too lonesome.

Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.

I'm not explaining this right. What happened was this. There were these beautiful feelings and loose little pleasures inside me. And this woman was something like an assembly line for my soul. I run these little pieces of myself through her and I come out complete. Now do you follow me?

Southerners are the more lonely and spiritually estranged, I think, because we have lived so long in an artificial social system that we insisted was natural and right and just - when all along we knew it wasn't.