When she packed up to leave, she knew that she was saying goodbye to something important, which was not that bad, in a way, because it meant that at least you had said hello to it to begin with.

She was afraid, and the afraid, she realized, sought opportunities for bravery in love.

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

Love is the answer, said the songs, and that's OK. It was OK, I supposed, as an answer. But no more than that. It was not a solution; it wasn't really even an answer, just a reply.

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.

Blasts from the past were like the rooms one entered and re-entered in dreams: they would not stay nailed down. When you returned to them, they had changed - they suddenly had more space or a tilt or a door that had not been there before. New people were milling around, the floors undulated, and the sun shone newly, strangely in the windows, or through the now blasted-open ceiling, or else it shone not at all, as if having fled the sky.

Personally I've never put much store by honesty- I mean how can you trust a word whose first letter you don't even pronounce