They are commiting murder who merely live.

Do I think there's life after death? No, I think my books are my life after death.

Is it perhaps the one necessity of love, that it be needed? And the one great human tragedy that it so rarely is?

One has only to set a loved human being against the fact that we are all in peril all the time to get back a sense of proportion. What does anything matter compared to the reality of love and its span, so brief at best, maintained against such odds?

It feels a long way up and down from zero.

Deep down there was understanding, not of the facts of our lives so much as of our essential natures.

In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.