Divisions of the kind were fashionable at that time, and it was so easy to stifle one's need to help by deciding that help could neither be accepted nor understood.

Listening to her, one experienced a deep uneasiness as of having avoided an urgent responsibility, like someone who, walking at night along the banks of a stream, catches a glimpse in the water of a white face or a moving limb and turns quickly away, refusing to help or to search for help. We all see the faces in the water. We smother our memory of them, even our belief in their reality, and become calm people of the world; or we can neither forget or help them. Sometimes by a trick of circumstances or dream or a hostile neighborhood of light we see our own face.

Much of living is an attempt to preserve oneself by annexing and occupying others.

Language, at least, may give up the secrets of life and death, leading us through the maze to the original Word as monster or angel, to the mournful place where we may meet Job and hear his cry, 'How long will you vex my soul and break me in pieces with words?

Everything is always a story, but the loveliest ones are those that get written and are not torn up and are taken to a friend as payment for listening, for putting a wise keyhole to the ear of my mind

But it is imperative, for our own survival, that we avoiid one another, and what more successful means of avoidance are there than words? Language will keep us safe from human onslaught, will express for us our regret at being unable to supply groceries or love or peace.

I must go down to the seas again to find where I buried the hatchet with Yesterday.