For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do - they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.

The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.

I complain a lot. That's one way of coping. But I'm in a profession where nobody tells you to quit. No board of other partners tells you it's time to get your gold watch, and no physical claim is made on you like an athlete or an actress. So I try to plug along on the theory that I can still do it. I still keep trying to produce prose, and some poetry, in the hope that I can find something to say about being alive, this country, but generally the human condition.

Without rain, there would be no life.

Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.

The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.

Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.