'Even the cat buries its dirt; I carry mine around with me.' She thought of saying it aloud many times in the weeks after she came home from the hosp… - Nadine Gordimer

Do we ever live really in the present? I don’t think so, not entirely, do you?...There are always intrusions, sometimes welcome, sometimes not, from the past.

I don't want to know more about her; don't want to know her weaknesses or calculate them. What I have is not for her; he gives me to understand she would not know what to do with it; it's not her fault. — One is married and there is nothing to be done. — Yet he has said to me, I would marry you if I could, meaning: I want very much to marry you. I offended him a bit by not being moved. It's other things he's said that are the text I'm living by. I really do not know if I want any form of public statement, status, code; such as marriage. There's nothing more private and personal than the life of a mistress, is there? Outwardly, no one even knows we are responsible to each other....

'This is the creature that has never been' — he told me a line of poetry about that unicorn, translated from German. A mythical creature. Un paradis inventé.

What is shameful cannot be shared. What is shameful, separates.