It is a wary business, walking about a strange house you are to know well. Only cats and dogs with their more expressive bodies enact the tension we share with them at such times. The you inside you gathers up defensively: something is stealing upon you every moment; you will never be quite the same again. These new unsmiling lights, reflections and objects are to become your memories, riveted to you closer than friends or lovers, going with you, even, into the grave: worse, they may become dear and fasten like so many leeches on your heart.

And yet in a way I would rather fail point blank. Things one can do have no value. I don't mind feeling small myself, but I dread finding the world is.

Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.

This is the worst of love, this unmeant mystification - someone smiling and going out without saying where, or a letter arriving, being read in your presence, …

Detroit turned out to be heaven, but it also turned out to be hell.

'There is a town in north Ontario / With dream comfort memory to spare / And in my mind, I still need a place to go / All my changes were there.' - 'Helpless'

One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering.