I could scarcely bear to look at her eyes. They promised such intimacies. — V. S. Naipaul

Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end, life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.

Before comfort had been squeezed out of the hard land, like blood out of stone.

I thought how terrible it would have been if, as could so easily have happened, I had died without knowing this depth of satisfaction, this other person that I had just discovered within myself. It was worth any price, any consequence.