guilt to motherhood is like grapes to wine

Ambition will, and should, always outstrip achievement.

Novelists... fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.

Style is what's there when you look at someone's writing and you know that they wrote it and nobody else did.

How has anyone ever understood anyone, except through love, which is wordless?

I learned that sex was not a question of victory or defeat, of pleasure or profit: of a hand's manipulation and a physical response: I learned that in its purest pleasure it belongs to neither of those who practise it, in the same way as a child belongs to neither parent: it is a free spirit: it simply exists.

For that is what a child should be, and seldom is, the product of man and woman, of opposing natures, unified, however temporarily, by the amazing, circling, weaving dance of love and lust and God's involvement in it.