Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.

He wanted to pay her; he thought women ought to be paid for keeping men from dying or going out of their minds.

For that's what a woman, a mother wants - to teach her children to take an interest in life. She knows it's safer for them to be interested in other people's happiness than to believe in their own.

I have never waited for anything the way I've waited for today, when nothing will happen.

All that remains of that minute is time in all its purity, bone-white time.

I'm still there, watching those possessed children, as far away from the mystery now as I was then. I've never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door.

The outrage was on the scale of God. My younger brother was immortal and they hadn't noticed. Immortality had been concealed in my brother's body while he was alive, and we hadn't noticed that it dwelt there. Now my brother's body was dead, and immortality with it. ... And the error, the outrage, filled the whole universe.