...how easy it would be to dream one's life out in some cleft in the world. - Willa Cather

People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know. We were... A man and woman draw apart from that long embrace, and see what they have done to each other... In age we lose everything; even the power to love.

Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.

and I had to look hard to see her face, which I meant always to carry with me; the closest, realest face, under all the shadows of women’s faces, at the very bottom of my memory.