The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great, that I thought I was in a dream.

You were my last chance' she's said but don't all women say that? - But can it be by 'last chance' she doesn't mean mere marriage but some profoundly sad realization of something in me she really needs to go on living, at least that impression coming across anyway on the force of all the gloom we've shared -

Sometimes I’d get mad because things didn’t work out so well, I’d spoil a flapjack, or slip in the snowfield while getting water, or one time my shovel went sailing down into the gorge, and I’d be so mad I’d want to bite the mountaintops and would come in the shack and kick the cupboard and hurt my toe. But let the mind beware, though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.

Some of my most neurotically fierce bitterness is the result of realizing how untrue people have become.

...we all must admit that everything is fine and there's no need in the world to worry, and in fact we should realize what it would mean to us to UNDERSTAND that we're not REALLY worried about ANYTHING.

The sun goes down long and red. All the magic names of the valley unrolled - Manteca, Madera, all the rest. Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon field; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries. I stuck my head out the window and took deep breaths of the fragant air. It was the most beautiful of all moments.

We lay on our backs looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when he made life so sad and disinclined.