“They are not sorrows, so much as terrible things.”

“There is nothing you can do except try to write it the way that it was. So you must write each day better than you possibly can and use the sorrow that you have now to make you know how the early sorrow came. And you must always remember the things you believed because if you know them they will be there in the writing and you won’t betray them. The writing is the only progress you make.”

“He had never quarreled much with this woman, while with the women that he loved he had quarreled so much they had finally, always, with the corrosion of the quarreling, killed what they had together. He had loved too much, demanded too much, and he wore it all out.”

“The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.”

“I had drunk much wine and afterward coffee and Strega and I explained, winefully, how we did not do the things we wanted to do; we never did such things.”

“Later he had seen the things that he could never think of and later still he had seen much worse.”

“Mr. Barnes, it is because I have lived very much that now I can enjoy everything so well”