I'm a writer, not a professional runner. It's fun and it helps me write. I need powerful concentration.

But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning.

You are entering a phase of your life in which many different things will occur...bad things that seem good at first and good things that seem bad at first.

Painful is the stress when one cannot reproduce or convey vividly to others, however hard he tries, what he's experienced so intensely.

But I didn't understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.

The better you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from reality.

it occurred to me what a simple thing reality is, how easy it is to make it work. It's just reality. Just housework. Just a home. Like running a simple machine. Once you learn to run it, it's just a matter of repetition. You push this button and pull that lever. You adjust a gauge, put on the lid, set the timer. The same thing, over and over.