We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what really was, what it meant.

She likes the people with the endurance to tolerate the drudge, the ones who know that pain is a requirement, not a curse.

It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.

He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake.

I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.

It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.

Life must pass through difficulty in order to achieve any modicum of beauty.