The measure of mindfulness, the touchstone for sanity in this society, is our level of productivity, our attention to responsibility, our ability to plain and simple hold down a job.

homesickness is just a state of mind for me. i'm always missing someone or someplace or something, i'm always trying to get back to some imaginary somewhere. my life has been one long longing.

The most likely person to kill you is your wife, but that probably won't happen. What probably will happen is a million little betrayals of varying degrees of pain, brought on by people you love, the only ones who really can hurt you.

Jesus, I wondered, what do you do with pain so bad it has no redeeming value? It cannot even be alchemized into art, into words, into something you can chalk up to an interesting experience because the pain itself, its intensity, is so great that it has woven itself into your system so deeply that there is no way to objectify or push it outside or find its beauty within. That is the pain I’m feeling now. Its so bad, its useless. The only lesson I will ever derive from this pain is how bad pain can be.

I am fortunate to have been well paid for an almost pathological honesty.

Everything's plastic, we're all going to die sooner or later, so what does it matter.

If you are chronically down, it is a lifelong fight to keep from sinking