Later, her first intense, serious love affair, yes then she'd lost something more tangible, if undefinable: her heart? her independence? her control of, definition of, self? That first true loss, the furious bafflement of it. And never again quite so assured, confident.

Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.

You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes.

The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought.

Exotic: meaning you're "desired." For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness. So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive.

To the west, the Pacific Ocean, which revulses me, for its vastness cannot be fitted into any box.

I am more or less reading all the time.