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

He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.

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

Something’s died in me,” she goes. “It took a long time for it to do it, but it’s dead. You’ve killed something, just like you’d took an axe to it. Everything is dirt now.

But he stays by the window, remembering that life. They had laughed. They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else—the cold and where he'd go in it—was outside, for a while anyway.

There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I'd like to know. I wish someone could tell me.

You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.