The pile of stones thus marks both an act of deliberate remembrance, and an act of deliberate forgetting. They're fond of paradox in that region.

She said, What you don't know won't hurt you. A dubious maxim: sometimes what you don't know an hurt you very much.

Where was the threshold, between the inner world and the outer one? We each move unthinkingly through this gateway every day, we use the passwords of grammar----paying for the privilege of sanity with...

Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.

...He was wrong about the sadness though: far better to have it when you're young. A sad pretty girl inspires the urge to console, unlike a sad old crone.

Another of those things that must be true because everyone else agrees they are, although they don't seem so to me.

None of this happens, of course. Or it does happen, but not so you would notice. It happens in another dimension of space.

Like the trains, she's never on time and always departing.Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous.

They did not set out to disappoint their father, not on purpose, but neither did they wish to shoulder the lumpy, enervating burden of the mundane.

The cicadas pierce the air with their searing one-note calls; dust eddies across the roads; from the weedy patches at the verges, grasshoppers whir. The leaves of the maples hang from their branches...

Your legacy from him is the realm of infinite speculation. You're free to reinvent yourself at will.

I didn't know I was about to be left with her idea of me; with her idea of my goodness pinned onto me like a badge and no chance to throw it back at her {as would have been the normal course of...

Behind the studied blankness of her gaze, revolt must have been simmering. I recognized that surliness, that stubbornness, that captive-princess indignation, which must be kept hidden until enough...

He loved her; in some ways he was devoted to her. But he couldn't reach her, and it was the same on her side. It was as if they'd drunk some fatal potion that would keep them forever apart, even...

But why bother about the end of the world? It's the end of the world every day, for someone. Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.

But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented. Without memory, there can be no revenge.

You should not be sad, he said, gazing at me with his melancholy, leathery walrus eyes. It must be the love. But you are young and pretty, you will have time to be sad later. The French are...

Bless you. Be careful. Anyone intending to meddle with words needs such blessing, such warning.

I was stuck in Port Ticonderoga, proud bastion of the common-and-garden variety button and of lower-priced long johns for the budget-minded shoppers. I would stagnate here, nothing would ever happen...

Stick a shovel in the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light.

As you ramble on through life, Brother,Whatever be your goal,Keep your eye upon the doughnut,And not upon the hole.

gazing down at the black water remembering all the stories of women who had thrown themselves into it. They'd done it for love, because that was the effect love had on you. It snuck up on you, it...

Yes, it does feel deceptively safer with two; but Thou is a slippery character. Every Thou I've known has had a way of going missing. They skip town or turn perfidious, or else the drop like flies and...

I must admit it's a surprise to find myself still here, still talking to you. I prefer to think of it as talking, although of course it isn't: I'm saying nothing, you're hearing nothing. The only...

In their dreams they touch, they intertwine, it's more like a collision, and that is the end of flying. They fall to earth, fouled parachutists, botched and cindery angels, love streaming out behind...

He'll find out somehow, because journeys end in lovers meeting.

I should have known better than to rely on pills. You can't buy unconsciousness quite so cheaply.

To pronounce the name of the dead is to make them live again, said the ancient Egyptians: not always what one might wish.

Spend this in remembrance of me.

You shouldn't do that," said Laura. "You could set yourself on fire.