The larger loneliness of our lives evolves from our unwillingness to spend ourselves, stir ourselves. We are always damping down our inner weather, permitting ourselves the comforts of postponement, of rehearsals

In one day I had altered my life; my life, therefore, was alterable. This simple axiom did not call out for exegesis; no, it entered my bloodstream directly, as powerful as heroin. I could feel it pump and surge, the way it brightened my veins to a kind of glass. I had wakened that morning to narrowness and predestination and now I was falling asleep in the storm of my own free will.

He dares not concern himself with the future for fear of disturbing the present.

Eventually, everything gets stuck between a pair of parentheses or buried in the bottom of a trunk.

This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.

Anyone's childhood can be an act of disablement if rehearsed and replayed and squinted at in a certain light. . .

A childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction.