A man could rant and smash and grapple with the State Police, and still the sprinklers whirled at dusk on every lawn and the television droned in every living room.

Synchronize watches at oh six hundred' says the infantry captain, and each of his huddled lieutenants finds respite from fear in the act of bringing two tiny pointers into jeweled alignment while tons of heavy artillery go fluttering overhead: the prosaic, civilian-looking dial of the watch has restored, however briefly, an illusion of personal control. Good, it counsels, looking tidily up from the hairs and veins of each terribly vulnerable wrist; fine: so far, everything's happening right on time.

He had won but he didn't feel like a winner.

Can you really think artists and writers are the only people entitled to lives of their own?

People did change, and a change could be a bloom as well as a withering.

Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn't much different, finally, from any other kind of dying.

if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.