Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.

On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.

Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.

Noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening past which was already piling up behind me. The growing size of that blank and ever-darkening past frightened me; it loomed beside me like a hole in the air and battened on scraps of my life I failed to claim. If one day I forgot to notice my life, and be damned grateful for it, the blank cave would suck me up entire.

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.

If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.