I don't know if I can face this. You know. The party and the ceremony, and then the hour after that, and the hour after that." "You don't have to go to the party. You don't have to go to the ceremony. You don't have to do anything at all." "But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another. I'm so sick.

The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.

This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.

The kiss was innocent--innocent enough--but it was also full of something not unlike what Virginia wants from London, from life; it was full of a love complex and ravenous, ancient, neither this nor that. It will serve as this afternoon's manifestation of the central mystery itself, the elusive brightness that shines from the edges of certain dreams; the brightness which, when we awaken, is already fading from our minds, and which we rise in the hope of finding, perhaps today, this new day in which anything might happen, anything at all.

As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.

She is, above all else, tired; she wants more than anything to return to her bed and her book. The world, this world, feels suddenly stunned and stunted, far from everything.

Love is deep, a mystery - who wants to understand its every particular?