It feels good, honey, but it isn't love.

The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.

This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone.

There is an hour when you realize: here is what you have been given. More than this, you won't receive. And what this is, what your life has come to, will be taken from you. In time.

[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness.

None of the rest of my life figures here.

When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover.