Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself — in fact, till it does that, it hardly is… — Elizabeth Bowen

Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We have really no absent friends.

Intimacies between women go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending up in small talk without loss of esteem.