I dressed and went for a walk - determined not to return until I took in what Nature had to offer.

That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window.

And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don't matter a damn anymore.

Then I said something. I said, Suppose, just suppose, nothing had ever happened. Suppose this was for the first time. Just suppose. It doesn't hurt to suppose. Say none of the other had ever happened. You know what I mean? Then what? I said.

It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power.

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.