“If little poems announce themselves I will open the door; they knock infrequently these days.”

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“I wrote somewhere that the poet at fifteen wants to be as great as Dante; by twenty-five he wants to be in The New Yorker.”

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“This house contained her, and I paced its rooms up and down. I moved furniture in the living room, undoing arrangements that accommodated her illness—her blue chair next to mine as we watched movies together. Walking up and down, often I howled. No one would hear me, deep in the country, to dial 911. My outbursts frightened our dog Gus, who wondered what he had done wrong. He searched for Jane everywhere and asked me to fetch her back. Several times each day, he brought me one of her shoes—slippers or sneakers—and set it on the floor beside me.”

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“Another thing we have in common was good, solid, loving, and companionate marriages. On one of our car trips, I complained over the useless, trivial hyperactivity of my eyes gazing at women. At any conference, or in an airport on the way, I find myself continually checking out the beauty of young women, dwelling on figures and faces. It disturbed me that I wasted time and energy evaluating quarries I would never mine. Wendell agreed explosively, as if he had been waiting for someone to bring up the subject. He suffered from this idle habit himself, and found himself in lecture halls doing inventories of the female audience. One day, he told me, he saw one face that was absolutely perfect and irresistible to him. It was a few seconds before he realized that his eyes had lighted on his wife, Tanya.”

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