Names are still magic; even Sharon, Karen, Darren, and Warren are magic to somebody somewhere. In fairy stories, naming is knowledge. When I know your name, I can call your name, and when I call your name, you'll come to me.

When a woman gives birth her waters break and she pours out the child and the child runs free.

Two things significantly distinguish human beings from the other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art. The invisible city not calculated to exist. Beyond the lofty pretensions of the merely ceremonial, long after the dramatic connivings of plitical life, like it or not, it remains. Time past eternally present and undestroyed.

Even death after a long illness is without warning. The moment you had prepared for so carefully took you by storm. The troops broke through the window and snatched the body and the body is gone. ... Death reduces us to the baffled logic of a small child. If yesterday why not today?

I think of love as a force of nature-as strog as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming,as drought-making as it is life-giving.

For fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed.

It's not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between.