We're only passers-by, and all you can do is love what you have in your life. A person has to fight the meanness that sometimes comes with you when you're born, sometimes grows if you aren't in lucky surroundings. It's our challenge to fend it off, leave it behind us choking and gasping for breath in the mud. It's our task to seek out something with truth for us, no matter if there is a hundred-mile obstacle course in the way, or a ramshackle old farmhouse that binds and binds.

In the end maybe what marriage offered was the determination of one's burial site.

It's all a big old chain. There isn't one unconnected link.

The magical descriptions of Italy and hilarious observations about love, travel, natives and foreigners in Love in Idleness are but a few of its many pleasures. Amanda Craig has created a hot shimmery climate in which a cast of old friends, quirky family members and naughty children who make love potions come to know themselves and their hearts. A delightful brew.

Life on earth, filled with uncertainty and change, seemed far more difficult than what lay beyond the grave.

This was life, I supposed, running and running and running, and realizing along the way that the phantom was getting closer.

My god has always been a laissez-faire deity, giving you the initial goods and sending you on to make your way.