She smiled at him, with longing. 'Where do you live,' she asked, 'and how do I get there?

It was like the classic scene in the movies where one lover is on the train and one is on the platform and the train starts to pull away, and the lover on the platform begins to trot along and then jog and then sprint and then gives up altogether as the train speeds irrevocably off. Except in this case I was all the parts: I was the lover on the platform, I was the lover on the train. And I was also the train.

We were in dialogue that was about something other than what we were saying.

(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.

All the world's a stage we're going through.

Awkwardness is where tension is, and tension is where the story is. It's also where the comedy is, which I'm interested in; when it resolves it tends to resolve toward melancholy, a certain resignation, which I find interesting as well.

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.