You couldn't pretend you had lost nothing... you had to begin there, not let your blood freeze over. If your heart turned away at this, it would turn away at something greater, then more and more until your heart stayed averted, immobile, your imagination redistributed away from the world and back only toward the bad maps of yourself, the sour pools of your own pulse, your own tiny, mean, and pointless wants.

Writing is both the excursion into and the excursion out of one's life. That is the queasy paradox of the artistic life. It is the thing that, like love, removes one both painfully and deliciously from the ordinary shape of existence. It joins another queasy paradox: that life is an amazing, hilarious, blessed gift and that it is also intolerable.

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

They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.

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.

You emptied the top rack of the dishwasher but not the bottom, so the clean dishes have gotten all mixed up with the dirty ones - and now you want to have sex?

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.