Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond— surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjects to which my predecessors apprenticed themselves. I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention.

Like a child, the earth's going to sleep, or so the story goes. But I'm not tired, it says. And the mother says, You may not be tired but I'm tired

Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary, imperial joy and sorrow of human existence, the dreamed as well as the lived— what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death?

Intense love always leads to mourning.

Birth, not death, is the hard loss.

I had nothing and I was still changed. Like a costume, my numbness was taken away. Then hunger was added.

As I saw it, all my mother's life, my father held her down, like lead strapped to her ankles. She was buoyant by nature; she wanted to travel, go to the theater, go to museums. What he wanted was to lie on the couch with the Times over his face, so that death, when it came, wouldn't seem a significant change.