There are some griefs so loud/They could bring down the sky/And there are griefs so still/None knows how deep they lie.

What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.

Light is snow sifted / To an abstraction.

Gardening is an instrument of grace.

If I were to choose one single thing that that would restore Paris to the senses, it would be that strangely sweet, unhealthy smell of the Métro, so very unlike the dank cold or the stuffy heat of subways in New York.

Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.

My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.