What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end.

Each of us, I suppose needs his illusions. Life after death. A maker of planets. A woman to love, a man to hate. Something sacred. But what a waste.

It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.

... when he kissed her, she received the kiss without returning it, her eyes wide open, not afraid, not a virgin's eyes, just flat and uninvolved.

They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.

Imagination is a killer.

By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.