There's nothing to talk about to strangers anymore, if you know what I mean. Everything I want to say, I say to her.

In truth, there are only two realities: the one for people who are in love or love each other, and the one for people who are standing outside all that.

What's agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn't care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you--if you happen to be me--with homecoming queens first, then girls next door, and finally anybody who might be pleased to see you now and then at the dinner table and in bed on occasion. You look up from reading the newspaper and realize that no one loves you, and no one burns for you.

Before, I was always trying to make my relationships work by means of willpower and forced affability. This time I didn't have to strive for anything. A quality of ease spread over us.

There's nothing to talk about to strangers anymore, if you know what I mean. Everything I want to say, I say to her.

What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight.

Literature is not an instruction manual.