This was love, I supposed, and eventually I would come to know it. Someday it would choose me and I would come to know its spell, for long stretches and short, two times, maybe three, and then quite probably it would choose me never again.

Women now were told not to settle for second best, told that they deserved better, but at a time, it seemed, when there was so much less to go around.

(Such a life)engaged gross quantities of hope and despair and set them wildly side by side, like a Third World country of the heart.

An agony. The exit like the entrance - but reserved. A palindrome: gut-tug.

I want to pretend there's such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.

Perhaps she drives men away. Perhaps, without even being able to help herself, she just puts men into her ill-tempered car and drives them off: to quarries, dumps, small anonymous bodies of water.

There was the usual dreaminess, I suppose. Also a shyness that caused me - and others - to notice that I could express myself better by writing than by speaking. This is typical of many writers, I think. What is a drawback in childhood is an asset to a literary life. Not being fluent on one’s feet sends one to the page and a habit is born.