The lawn was white with doctors

Don't let the wicked city get you down.

I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I'd never seen before in my life.

O love, how did you get here?

I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near unto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.

What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.

Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.