We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.

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. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them.

I would like to live. . . open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.

It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.

The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge.

At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting

We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.