Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself.

I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it.

You know, I'm just a very boring, not very funny person in person. I don't feel pressured to be otherwise.

The affectionate farce I make of him ignores the ways I feel his lack of love for me. But we are managing.

I always do the wrong. I do the wrong thing so much that the times I actually do the right thing stand out so brightly in my memory that I forget I always do the wrong thing.

That is what is wrong with cold people. Not that they have ice in their souls - we all have a bit of that - but that they insist every word and deed mirror that ice. They never learn the beauty or value of gesture. The emotional necessity. For them, it is all honesty before kindness, truth before art. Love is art, not truth. It's like painting scenery.

Basically, I realized I was living in that awful stage of life between twenty-six to and thirty-seven known as stupidity. It's when you don't know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don't even have a philosophy about all the things you don't know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight.