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?

When you fall in love, it is spring no matter when. Leaves falling make no difference, they are from another season.

All my life I had feared imprisonment, the nun's cell, the hospital bed, the places where one faced the self without distraction, without the crutches of other people.

shadows of love, inebriations of love, foretastes of love, trickles of love, but never yet the one true love.

We hide the truer part of ourselves when we love.

You have to be lonely to be a writer

Later as the day cools and they have gone in, the cry of the corncrake will carry across those same fields and over the lake to the blue-hazed mountain, such a lonely evening sound to it, like the lonely evening sound of the mothers, saying it is not our fault that we weep so, it is nature's fault that makes us first full, then empty.