Do the thing that's less passive. Do the active thing. There's more of the human in that.

Let me just say that I am not often lonely in country places. In cities I am, like the writers of the letters. Nature doesn't break your heart: other people do. Yet, we cannot live apart from each other in bowers feeding on nectar. We're in this together, this getting through our lives, as the fact that we are word-users shows.

Novels are completed when they are finished, but the memoir changes its own conclusion by virtue of being written... I was not at all the same person, when I handed the manuscript to the publisher, as I had been when I began. A memoir may always be retrospective, but the past is not where its action takes place.

If there were nothing else, reading would--obviously--be worth living for.

A bugler sounded the Last Post. Heartbreak made audible.

...friendship is something you do.

Do the thing that's less passive. Do the active thing. There's more of the human in that.