Fiction doesn't appeal to me because it can describe physical appearances exhaustively or because it can offer access to the inner depths of an array of human characters - neither that kind of "realism" of bodily surfaces nor of individual psychologies seems particularly realistic to me.

The problem is that if you're self-conscious about being a person on whom nothing is lost, isn't something lost - some kind of presence? You're distracted by trying to be totally, perfectly impressionable.

Just in case God isn't dead, our astronauts carry sidearms.

Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.

Maggie Nelson cuts through our culture's prefabricated structures of thought and feeling with an intelligence whose ferocity is ultimately in the service of love. No piety is safe, no orthodoxy, no easy irony. The scare quotes burn off like fog.

The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.

Every relationship can feel saturated by market logic or at best purchased at the price of the immiseration of others.