If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days--listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off. You take home all you've taken in, all that you've overheard, and you turn it into gold. (Or at least you try.)

The reason I never give up hope is because everything is so basically hopeless.

I wish there were shortcuts to wisdom and self-knowledge: cuter abysses or three-day spa wilderness experiences. Sadly, it doesn't work that way. I so resent this.

It's incredibly touching when someone who seems so hopeless finds a few inches of light to stand in and makes everything work as well as possible. All of us lurch and fall, sit in the dirt, are helped to our feet, keep moving, feel like idiots, lose our balance, gain it, help others get back on their feet, and keep going.

...after a few days at the desk, telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat.

Publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is.

I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world-present and in awe.