This vast life - the real, interior one in which we remain linked to the dead (because the dream inside us ignores trivialities like breath, or absence) - this vast life is not under our control. Everything we have seen and everyone we have known goes into us and constitutes us, whether we like it or not. We are linked together in a pattern we cannot see and whose effects we cannot know.

The cynic sees only cynicism, the depressive can taint creation with one glance

There are no people who are whole" he says. "Everyone has issues of their own to deal with. Mine might be a little harder, but the main thing is how on deals with them.

one does not remember one’s own pain. It is the suffering of others that undoes us

Memory, like so much else, is unreliable. Not only for what it hides and what it alters, but also for what it reveals.

We don't catch hold of an idea, rather the idea catches hold of us and enslaves us and whips us into the arena so that we, forced to be gladiators, fight for it.

This vast life - the real, interior one in which we remain linked to the dead (because the dream inside us ignores trivialities like breath, or absence) - this vast life is not under our control. Everything we have seen and everyone we have known goes into us and constitutes us, whether we like it or not. We are linked together in a pattern we cannot see and whose effects we cannot know.