Life pulls softly inside your bindings. The pod glows - dear stench.

M: Is he smart I: She yes very smart sees right through me M: In my day we valued blindness rather more

Philosophy - hopeless. Yet it gives me hope.

One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.

I do think that something of the effect I have on people is to put everything on an edge where they're both infatuated with a kind of charmingness happening in the person or in the writing, and also flatly terrified by a revelation or acceptance of revelation that's almost happening, never quite totally happening.

Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.

You can get used to eating breakfast with a man in a fedora. You can get used to anything, my mother was in the habit of saying.