There is something I have learned since being paralyzed, and that is that in the absence of sensory information, the imagination always tends to the grotesque.

Strange how reluctant I was to acknowledge that control of my fate lay beyond my own conscious will. Habit of a lifetime, I suppose.

A tissue of small sounds filled the room, a bird, a clock, a voice from another garden. What we call silence.

these are precisely the conditions that killed love, after first blighting its growth: squalor, fear, uncertainty, overfamiliarity.

Perhaps that’s the whole point about infidelity, I suggested, not that one has sex but that by doing so one puts at risk someone else’s happiness?

For despite his confidence, and his apparent maturity, I suspected that there was in him a deep and childish need to elevate, and idealize, the love object. This is not uncommon in artists. The very...