If prose can cast a spell, we will listen to it no matter what it's saying. If a narrative uses language in a magical and enlivening way, we will listen to the story. But if the language doesn't cast a spell, we will listen to it only if it is telling us something that actually happened.

No matter what terror the earth could produce - winds, seas - a person could produce the same, lived with the same, lived with all that mixed-up nature swirling inside, every bit. There was nothing as complex in the world - no flower or stone - as a single hello from a human being.

If you're suicidal, and you don't actually kill yourself, you become known as 'wry.

Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks.

After a childhood of hungering to be an adult, my hunger had passed. Unexpected fates had begun to catch my notice. These middle-aged women seemed very tired to me, as if hope had been wrung out of them and replaced with a deathly, walking sort of sleep.

As the most recently arrived to earthly life, children can seem in lingering possession of some heavenly lidless eye.

This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.