This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern.

She maintained a careful balance by her window, never allowing the men to come too close, never allowing them to stray too far.

...because he had been waiting for someone to come back to him, so every time someone knocked on the door, he couldn't stop himself from hoping it might be that person, even though he knew he shouldn't hope.

I wanted to tell her everything, maybe if I'd been able to, we could have lived differently, maybe I'd be there with you now instead of here. Maybe... if I'd said, 'I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything,' maybe that would have made the impossible possible. Maybe, but I couldn't do it, I had buried too much too deeply inside me. And here I am, instead of there.

The hardest part of writing is not to get the ideas but to remember, why it is important to get them.

She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life.

Love...is the immovability of truth.