in my experience one thing you don't learn from is anything anyone set up to be a lesson; what you are to know you pick up as you go along.

children like change - for one thing, they never anticipate regret.

... love dreads being isolated, being left to speak in a void -- at the beginning it would often rather listen than speak.

When one is a child, the disposition of objects, tables and chairs and doors, seems part of the natural order: a house-move lets in chaos - as it does for a dog.

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart.

Ghosts seem harder to please than we are; it is as though they haunted for haunting’s sake -- much as we relive, brood, and smoulder over our pasts.