I loved them all the way one loves at any age -- if it's real at all -- obsessively, painfully, with wild exultation, with guilt, with conflict; I wrote poems to and about them, I put them into novels (disguised of course); I brooded upon why they were as they were, so often maddening don't you know? I wrote them ridiculous letters. I lived with their faces. I knew their every gesture by heart. I stalked them like wild animals. I studied them as if they were maps of the world -- and in a way I suppose they were.

It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it.

I believe that children long for form just as grownups do, and that it releases rather than cramps creative energy.

Pain can make a whole winter bright, like fever, force us to live deep and hard.

It's extraordinary how little two people can understand each other and how cruel two people who are fond of each other can be to each other - there is practically no cruelty so awful because their power to hurt is so great.

It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard.

Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets -- they're more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away.