I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.

The spring of 1930 marks the end of a period of grave concern...American business is steadily coming back to a normal level of prosperity.

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives -- and time itself -- would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.

we must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death

He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.

He feared me as many men fear women: because their mistresses (or their wives) understand them. They are scarcely adult, some men: they wish women to understand them, and to that end they tell them all their secrets; and then, when they are properly understood, they hate their women for understanding them.

Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all.