Reading is rapture (or if it isn't, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door).

Love, even of the most ardent and soul-destroying kind, is never caught by the lens of the camera.

In talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw.

It was lovely when you found students who responded to things you were enthusiastic about.

It's deprivation that makes people writers, if they have it in them to be a writer.

Because I actively enjoy sleeping, dreams, the unexplainable dialogues that take place in my head as I am drifting off, all that, I tell myself that lying down to an afternoon nap that goes on and on through eternity is not something to be concerned about. What spoils this pleasant fancy is the recollection that when people are dead they don't read books. This I find unbearable.

Sometimes she goes out to work as a practical nurse, and comes home and sits by the kitchen table soaking her feet in a pan of hot water and Epsom salts. When she gets into bed and the springs creak under her weight, she groans with the pleasure of lying stretched out on an object that understands her so well.