I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more.

And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide.

Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself.

Do we always grind through the present, doomed to throw a gold haze of fond retrospect over the past?

My wanting to write books annihilates the original root impulse that would have me bravely and blunderingly working on them.

And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die.

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there.