Nothing changes what alreaday happened. It will always have happened. You either let it break you down or you don't.

She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for her being.

That's not a thing any of us are granted. To go back. Wipe away what later doesn't suit us and make it the way we wish it. You just go on

Needing and getting don’t seem likely to match up any time soon... What needs doing is mine to do.

Contentment is mostly a matter of talking yourself into believing that God will not strike you too hard for leaning in the direction of your hungers.

So of course time is necessary. But nevertheless damn painful, for it transforms all the pieces of your life - joy and sorrow, youth and age, love and hate, terror and bliss - from fire into smoke rising up the air and dissipating on a breeze.

My opinion was that if hogs are biting you so often that you have to stop and make up a specific word for it, maybe lack of vocabulary is not your most pressing problem.