Being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.

I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on.

You have a conscience, and a conscience is a valuable attribute, but not if it begins to make you think you were to blame for what is far beyond the scope of your responsibility.

And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.

I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface

Because that is when you love somebody - when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.

Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.