“I rose and moved towards him. You would have done the same yourself. It is an ancient matter. Something propels you towards sudden grief, or perhaps also sometimes repels. You move away. I moved towards it, I couldn't help it.”

“Her greatest wish I should think was that I would remain exactly as I was, and how I regret that that was not to be. It was only for her roses that she wished for change, the strange moment of loral enchantment when the branch of a rose mutates, and shows a "sport," something new arising from the known rose. A leap in beauty.”

“I wanted to listen to him, but I did not want to answer now. That strange responsibility we feel towards others when they speak, to offer them the solace of any answer. Poor humans! And anyway he had not asked a question. He was merely floating there in the room, insubstantial, a living man in the midst of life, dying imperceptibly on his feet, like all of us.”

“I wonder if I were to have an X-ray at the little hospital, would the machine see my grief? Is it like rust, arheum about the heart?”

“I hate writing, I hate pens and paper and all that fussiness. I have done well enough without it too, I think. Oh, I am lying to myself. I have feared writing. But books have saved me sometimes, that is the truth - my Samaritans.”

“To remember sometimes is a great sorrow, but when the remembering has been done, there comes afterwards a very curious peacefulness. Because you have planted your flag on the summit of the sorrow. You have climbed it.And I notice again in the writing of this confession that there is nothing called long-ago after all. When things are summoned up, it is all present time, pure and simple. So that, much to my surprise, people I have loved are allowed to live again. What it is that allows them I don’t know. I have been happy now and then in the last two weeks, the special happiness that is offered from the hand of sorrow.”

“Roseanne, Roseanne, if I called to you now, my own self calling to my own self, would you hear me? And if you could hear me, would you heed me?”