And he remembered thinking then that if she died, he was certain he wouldn't cry. For it would be the dying face of an unknown, a street face, a newspaper image, and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly empty man near a silly empty woman.

You don’t question Providence. If you can’t have the reality, a dream is just as good.

What should I do?" "Throw up in your typewriter every morning." "Yeah." "Clean up every noon.

He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life.

Heaven is a house with porch lights.

He felt his smile slide away, melt, fold over and down on itself like a tallow skin, like the stuff of a fantastic candle burning too long and now collapsing and now blown out.

How men envy and often hate these warm clocks, these wives, who know they will live forever. So what do we do? We men turn terribly mean, because we can't hold to the world or ourselves or anything. We are blind to continuity, all breaks down, falls, melts, stops, rots, or runs away. So, since we cannot shape Time, where does that leave men? Sleepless. Staring.