Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself.

If you've really loved a book, or a movie for that matter, really loved it, what you want is that same book again, but as if you've never read it. And when you get something unfamiliar, you feel betrayed.

You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.

What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy's other half.

There is 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 , though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so.

On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.

I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.