Desire smells almost subliminally of summer peaches, and casts two shadows: one black and sharp edged, the other translucent and forever wavering, like heat haze.

“It was what he wanted.” “He was a child. He did not know what he wanted.“

A message written in blood. Everyone involved in this drama seems compelled to overact.

Someone out there can’t get me out of his head, birdie. Someone out there is starting to believe he IS me, and it’s been keeping me up nights, if you know what I mean.

Had you been content with life’s surfaces, as would all have been happier.

So shall we all live happily ever after? I do not know. Ask me again in another thirty years.

I know what I said. I was there, after all. And I was lying.

“And what are you going to be when you grow up, sweet child?” “Dead.”

Her dream fades as she wakes. She remembers little of it. There was somebody she really liked, somebody in difficulty… She couldn’t help them.

I love you very much. I don’t care what you’ve done or who with. All I want is not to have to share you with the whole wide world. That’s all. I want you back.

Because it’s my duty, I suppose. Because it’s my job.

I’m no cuckold…

The librarian should learn to keep his nose in his books and out of places where it isn’t welcome.

Every spring day for over sixty years he has picked a blossom from the cherry tree; every spring day he has placed it on the lady’s grave, as his father and grandfather did before him.

You’re everybody’s mother.

He’s not my dad. My dad was a real man. He’s just some guy who sells shoes…

I love her. I do. But… she’s gone. She’s not coming back. And you’re here.

And that’s their fall, and that’s their fellowship. Desire. The hood in the bucket: the gulf of yearning into which the soul empties itself. He drops a note. The discord is his tribute to them.

Death— is a heartbreakingly beautiful, witty young woman. Dream— is Dream, somber, a tad pretentious, and a tad neurotic.