There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined.

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.

I think writing is, by definition, an optimistic act.

There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined.

Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am.

I feel like there's something terrible and wonderful and amazing that's just beyond my grasp. I have dreams about it. I do dream, by the way. It hovers over me at odd moments. And then it's gone. I feel like I'm always on the brink of something that never arrives. I want to either have it or be free of it.

What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run.