Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

He knew it was possible for shame to be nursed and doctored like an illness, if you wanted to keep it separate from the rest of your life, but that didn't mean there'd be any way to keep from knowing it was there.

In avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations. For the time being the world, life itself, could be his chosen field.

Hard work, is the best medicine yet devised for all the ills of man- and of woman.

It haunted him all night, while he slept alone; it was still there in the morning, when he swallowed his coffee and backed down the driveway in the crumpled old Ford. And riding to work, one of the youngest and healthiest passengers on the train, he sat with the look of a man condemned to a very slow, painless death. He felt middle-aged.

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

And do you know a funny thing? I'm almost fifty years old and I've never understood anything in my whole life.