She won't give him back his look.

Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.

Art doesn't have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it.

Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He'd said he'd spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important years of his life.

Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.

This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.

If we're lucky, writer and reader alike, we'll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we'll ponder what we've just written or read; maybe our hearts or intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we'll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, "created of warm blood and nerves" as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life.