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

Write about winter in the summer.

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

A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, "Simba!

Like everyone in his right mind, I feared Santa Claus.

Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.

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.