I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.

We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.

What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.

if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.

What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?