?He had assumed, as a husband and then an adulterous one, that his need for a woman was as carnal as it was spiritual. But now celibacy was easy; when he imagined a woman, she was drinking with him, eating dinner. So his most intense and perhaps his only need for a woman was then; and all the reasons for the end of his marriage became distant, blurred, and he wondered if the only reason he was now alone was a misogyny he had never recognized: that he did not even want a woman except at day?s end, and had borne all the other hours of woman-presence only to have her comfort as the clock?s hands moved through their worst angles of the day.?
—Andre Dubus, ?The Winter Father?
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