The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters

The nail doesn't choose the time or the circumstances in which it is drawn to the magnet

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).

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.

I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn’t have gone through and couldn’t get back to the place I hadn’t meant to leave.

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

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