And in your new lives you'll have to live entirely for that one sensation-that of imminent truth. And you're going to have to holler for it, steal for it, beg for it-and you're never to stop asking questions about it twenty-four hours a day, the rest of your life.

Death without the possibility of ever changing the world is the same as a life that never was.

I think writing would have happened to me anyway, somehow. Differently, but it still would have happened.

We sleep heavily because we need to ask so many questions as we dream alone.

As you grow older, it becomes harder to feel 100 percent happy; you learn all the things that can go wrong, you become superstitious about tempting fate, about bringing disaster upon your life by accidentally feeling too good one day.

What's clarity like? Try to remember that funny feeling inside your head when you had math problems too difficult to solve: the faint buzzing noise in your ears, a heaviness on both sides of your skull, and the sensation that your brain is twitching inside your cranium like a fish on the beach. This is the opposite sensation of clarity. Yet for many people of my era, as they aged, this sensation became the dominant sensation of their lives. It was as though day-to-day twentieth century living had become an unsolvable algebraic equation.

Chronocanine Envy: Sadness experienced when one realized that, unlike one's dog, one cannot live only in the present tense. As Kierkegaard said, "Life must be lived forward.