This so gnawed at him on some nights that he lay awake wondering just how many unknown and similarly inconsequential accidents and bits of happenstance were at this moment occurring or failing to occur in order to ensure he took his next breath, and the next.

Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.

If only I had discipline, but alas, it is only an obsessive-compulsive trait and the beauty of habit that causes me to return again and again to my work.

I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.

In our own beginnings, we are formed out of the body's interior landscape. For a short while, our mothers' bodies are the boundaries and personal geography which are all that we know of the world...Once we no longer live beneath our mother's heart, it is the earth with which we form the same dependent relationship, relying...on its cycles and elements, helpless without its protective embrace.

I did not choose solitude. Who would? It came on me like a kind of vocation, demanding an effort that married women can't picture.

What men call adventures usually consist of the stoical endurance of appalling daily misery.