“I want the cottage. I want the green grass and the tomato plants. I want the peace in you; the front porch rocking chair lullaby; our cricket legs rubbing together under the covers. We can’t have it all. I know that, but humor me. We can’t have it all, but we can have most of it.”

“In front of my mother and my sisters, I pretend love is cheap and vulgar. I act like it’s a sin– I pretend that love is for women on a dark path. But at night i dream of a love so heavy it makes my spine throb.– I dream up a lover who makes love like he is separating salt from water.”

April advanced to May: a bright serene May it was; days of blue sky, placid sunshine, and soft western or southern gales filled up its duration. (...) it became all green, all flowery;

“And I’m finally beginning to suspect that perhaps we’re not meant to understand life. All these furious attempts to explain and understand, this ongoing quest for the truth, may be a dead end. We bless the sun because we live the exact distance from it that is beneficial. A few million miles closer or farther away and we would burn or freeze to death. What if the truth is like the sun?”

“Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether it yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.”

“Deep within everyone’s heart there always remains a sense of longing for that hour, that summer, that one brief moment of blossoming. For several weeks or months, rarely longer, a beautiful young woman lives outside ordinary life. She is intoxicated. She feels as if she exists beyond time, beyond its laws; she experiences not the monotonous succession of days passing by, but moments of intense, almost desperate happiness.”

“Come with all your shame, come with your swollen heart, I’ve never seen anything more beautiful than you.”