Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end, life is always going on. You should begin in the middle… — V. S. Naipaul

I could scarcely bear to look at her eyes. They promised such intimacies.

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.