For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.

She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.

Things between us were dissolving like an ice cub in a glass: the smaller it got, the faster it disappeared.

the compulsion to read and write - and it seems to me it should be, even must be, a compulsion - is a bit of mental wiring the species has selected, over time, in order, as the life span increases, to keep us interested in ourselves.

But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.

Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.

I wished for eternal and intriguing muteness. I would be the Mysterious Dumb Girl, the Enigmatic Elf. The human voice no longer interested me.