Time is not a thing that passes ... it's a sea on which you float.

Is anything wrong, dear? the old joke went. No, why? You moved. Just don't move.

The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.

My parents were gardeners themselves, and perforce they used environmental techniques because it was during the war, and you didn't have the new sorts of chemicals.

This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year's threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future; the place of caught breath.

Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.