Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? There had been addition and subtraction in my life, but how much multiplication?

You grew old first not in your own eyes, but in other people's eyes; then, slowly, you agreed with their opinion of you.

Women were brought up to believe that men were the answer. They weren't. They weren't even one of the questions.

Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) - how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at see, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us. Catastrophe has become art; but this is no reducing process. It is freeing, enlarging, explaining. Catastrophe has become art: that is, after all, what it is for.

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.

I am death-fearing. I don't think I'm morbid. That seems to me a fear of death that goes beyond the rational. Whereas it seems to me to be entirely rational to fear death!

Irony ... may be defined as what people miss.