I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.

To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole.

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

...with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.

Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.

Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction