As long as you can Houdini your way out of the Sisyphean constraints then originality happens.

As for reading, I wish I had a magic door to a library where I could go in, read for days and days, and come back in the same minute I left. I'm still looking for the door.

Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman.

…and there, in the background, the sky’s sediment had sunk to a place where all the woe of the words ‘I am’ dissolved into blue peace. He said it. ‘The ocean.

I'm not from a milieu where high-register language or philosophical ideas were welcome.

Oh, diplomacy ... it mops up war's spillages; legitimizes its outcomes; gives the strong state the means to impose its will on a weaker one, while saving its fleets and battalions for weightier opponents.

But no, we cross, crisscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters.