You make do with what you have. As you age you learn even to be happy with what you have.

What I feel for her is a wholly different emotion. It stands and walks on its own, living and breathing and throbbing and shaking me to the roots of my being.

When you are used to the kind of life -of never getting anything you want- you stop knowing what it is you want.

This uneasiness comes over me from time to time, and I feel as if I've somehow been pieced together from two different puzzles.

I am worrying about my country. I feel I have a responsibility as a novelist to do something.

Never trust a man who carries a handkerchief, I always say. One of many prejudicial rules of thumb.

In his or her own way, everyone I saw before me looked happy. Whether they were really happy or just looked it, I couldn't tell. But they did look happy on this pleasant early afternoon in late September, and because of that I felt a kind of loneliness new to me, as if I were the only one here who was not truly part of the scene.