The basic idea that the purpose of life is to be happy or is to experience the most favorable ratio of pleasure to suffering or productivity to work or gratification to sacrifice or any of that stuff, which, you know, a couple generations ago, to say that kind of stuff would have made you, you know, a freak - a freak and an Epicurean - and now seems to be so much - simply an unquestioned assumption of the culture that we don't really even talk about it anymore.

K--: 'When they say "I am my own person," "I do not need a man," "I am responsible for my own sexuality," they are actually telling you just what they want you to make them forget.

The way I think about things and experience things is not particularly linear, and it's not orderly, and it's not pyramidical, and there are a lot of loops.

To be, in a word, unborable.... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish

Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke. This can be tricky.

I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.

Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.