I am not kind, I cut people off as with shears and I drop them like nettles.

There are times when the thing we are seeing changes before our very eyes, and if it is a landscape we praise nature, and if it is celestial we invoke God, but if it is a loved one who defects, we excuse ourselves and say we have to be somewhere and are already late for our next appointment. We do not stay to put pennies over the half-dead eyes.

In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and it is this: Is there someone new?

What we forgot as children is that our parents are children, also. The child in them has not been satisfied or met or loved, often.

Death in its way comes just as much of a surprise as birth.

Movie people are possessed by demons, but a very low form of demons.

Cities, in many ways, are the best repositories for a love affair. You are in a forest or a cornfield, you are walking by the seashore, footprint after footprint of trodden sand, and somehow the kiss or the spoken covenant gets lost in the vastness and indifference of nature. In a city there are places to remind us of what has been.