When the beginnings of self destruction enter the heart, it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.

Admite the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the lord.

Without a reader, I cannot write. It's like a kiss: they cannot be done alone.

I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.

I write to make sense of my life." -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey

Alice Malloy had dark, stringy hair, and even her husband, who loved her more than he knew, was sometimes reminded by her lean face of a tenement doorway on a rainy day, for her countenance was long, vacant, and weakly lighted, a passage for the gentle transports and miseries of the poor.

A page of good prose remains invincible.