The mind abhors a vacancy & is wont to people it with phantoms.

Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again.

Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don't remember summer even saying goodbye.

I've become a less brave traveller since I became a dad, but in the past I was more foolhardy than brave.

The healthy can't understand the emptied, the broken.

Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one's core. Rome'll decline and fall again, Cortés'll lay Tenochtitlán to waste again, and later, Ewing will sail again, Adrian'll be blown to pieces again, you and I'll sleep under the Corsican stars again, I'll come to Bruges again, fall in and out of love with Eva again, you'll read this letter again, the sun'll grow cold again. Nietzsche's gramophone record. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities.

All revolutions are the sheerest fantasy until they happen; then they become historical inevitabilities.