I expect we are all jealous of the women in their past, but how much less exciting if the women had not kept the bed warm.

She had begun to read in the beginning as a protection from the frightening and unpleasant things. She continued because, apart from the story, literature brought with it a kind of gentility for which she craved.

If I have not lost my mind I can sometimes hear it preparing to defect

I expect we are all jealous of the women in their past, but how much less exciting if the women had not kept the bed warm.

Life is full of alternatives but no choice.

She would have liked to sit upon a rock and listen to words, not of any man, but detached, mysterious, poetic words that she alone would interpret through some sense inherited from sleep.

Because he had nothing to hide, he did perhaps appear to have forfeited a little of his strength. But that is the irony of honesty.