One likes to think there's something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I've learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.

And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.

The trouble is when people read about authors, they don't feel compelled to read the authors' work.

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work.

Still when I lost her, I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life.