Without a revolution of the inner life, however slow, all our big designs are worthless. The work we have to do is with ourselves if we're ever going to be at peace with each other...the good that flows from it will shape our societies in an unprogrammed, unforeseen way, under the control of no single group of people or set of ideas.

At the back of my mind I had a sense of us sitting about waiting for some terrible event, and then I would remember that it had already happened.

I read in announcements of deaths 'peacefully in his sleep' and I wonder how many of those are true. Maybe they are just conventional. I hope they are true whenever I read it of someone. [But] I would rather be awake. Peacefully awake, brim full of some calming drug that was seeing me out of the door, having said my farewells.

The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.

Love doesn't grow at a steady rate, but advances in surges, bolts, wild leaps, and this was one of those.

We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white.

The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella--and was necessary to it.