In heterosexual love there's no solution. Man and woman are irreconcilable, and it's the doomed attempt to do the impossible, repeated in each new affair, that lends heterosexual love its grandeur.

A woman's work, from the time she gets up to the time she goes to bed, is as hard as a day at war, worse than a man's working day. ... To men, women's work was like the rain-bringing clouds, or the rain itself. The task involved was carried out every day as regularly as sleep. So men were happy - men in the Middle Ages, men at the time of the Revolution, and men in 1986: everything in the garden was lovely.

Even so you have managed to live that love in the only way possible for you. Losing it before it happened.

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.

a writer is a foreign country

A prolonged silence ensues. The reason for the silence is our growing interest one for the other. No one is aware of it, no one yet; no one? am I quite sure?

...as long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn't happened.