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

Nights without work I spend with whisky and books.

He sometimes wondered if she had become involved with him just so that she could cry in someone's arms. Maybe she can't cry alone, and that's why she needs me.

At any rate, that’s how I started running. Thirty three—that’s how old I was then. Still young enough, though no longer a young man. The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill. That age may be a kind of crossroads in life. That was the age when I began my life as a runner, and it was my belated, but real, starting point as a novelist.

They sat on a park bench, held hands, and told each other their stories hour after hour. They were not lonely anymore. They had found and been found by their 100% perfect other. What a wonderful thing it is to find and be found by your 100% perfect other. It's a miracle, a cosmic miracle.

Have you ever had that feeling—that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?

Exhaustion pays no mind to age or beauty. Like rain and earthquakes and hail and floods.