For people who are displaced, you can reconstruct the story of your life from the objects you have access to, but if you don't have the objects then there are holes in your life. This is why people in Bosnia - if anyone was running back into a burning house it was to salvage photos.

All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

I'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that.

I suppose I'm interested in sorrow, which is very different from depression or despair. Sorrow is continuous with the world; it allows for creativity.

I had an epiphany: I was a loser.

It's so internalized, the way your mind works in relation to anything - it's a process, but then it isn't. It's working all the time.