How many beginnings before you see the lies in your excitement?

It frequently happens that I begin a novel with just a visual image of something, a vague sense of people in three dimensional space.

the instant he knew he loved her, she slipped down his body and out of his arms

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

Facts are lonely things.

Ecology is boring for the same reason that destruction is fun.

To plot is to live. […] We start out lives in chaos, in babble. As we surge up into the world, we try to devise a shape, a plan. There is dignity in this. Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram. It is a failed scheme but that's not the point. To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control. Even after death, most particularly after death, the search continues. Burial rites are an attempt to complete the scheme, in ritual. Picture a state funeral, Jack. It is all precision, detail, order, design. The nation holds its breath. - (WN 292)