Strangle him? Salute him? Put him in a novel? You are seeing suffering, Robert used to say when confronted with a horrible person. You are seeing someone in pain.

What could be more normal than to be out of place everywhere you go? What could be more American?

You may think: What’s happened? Good God, are they kidding? But it is a rule of life, alas, that nobody is kidding.

Only a fraction of the old magic remains, and impostors are everywhere!”

within this nested set of Vlads, completely concealed, is Vlad himself, carved from a single piece of wood, Vlad the Lad: the nut Dorothy is searching for.

That’s all we have. We must celebrate them. Remember that. I don’t care who you love, but if you love someone…if you love someone, you have to love them every day. You have to choose them every day.”

In the middle of their time together as a couple, when the hazy spell of early love had faded but the mist of disillusion had not yet settled over them, a romantic period whose ordinariness can sometimes overshadow its clarity, which has its own beauty, Robert took Less to Provincetown.

I understood that happiness is within our grasp if we reach for it.

What do we want from the past, anyway? For it to trifle with us no longer? For it to cease its surprises, its stirrings, its stings, for it to be fixed forever—for it to die? But the past is like those jellyfish that, when harmed, coil into themselves and revert to immature blobs from which they begin new lives and become, in simple terms, immortal