We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

The first breathe of adultery is the freest.

It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values - the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell of the glue, even the print, which has its own beauty. But there's something about the sensation of ink on paper that is in some sense a thing, a phenomenon rather than an epiphenomenon. I can't break the association of electric trash with the computer screen. Words on the screen give the sense of being just another passing electronic wriggle.

What we need is progress with an escape hatch.

I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either.

The muttered hint, "Remember, you have a stroke here," freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.