Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.

The cheesecake was smooth and lush, with the personality of a warm and well-to-do uncle who knows a hundred dirty jokes and will die of sexual exertions in the arms of his mistress.

A dead afternoon in a dark bar was not the worst of fates.

Technology is lust removed from nature.

There were moments when she wasn't talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funnelled stretch of recent past.

I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this living space writing these notes, this journal, recording my acts and reflections, finding some honor, some worth at the bottom of things. I want ten thousand pages that will stop the world.

It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.