You have to be able to make a real creative life for Yourself, before you can expect anyone Else to provide one ready-made for you.

If you pluck out my heart To find what makes it move, You’ll halt the clock That syncopates our love.

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.

A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals.

I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.

I began to see why woman-haters could make such fools of women. Woman-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chock full of power. They descended, and then they disappeared. You could never catch one.

I like people, but to learn about one individual always appeals to me more than anything.