Ever since that happened to me, I haven't been able to give myself to anyone in this world.

Her voice was like a line from an old black-and-white Jean-Luc Godard movie, filtering in just beyond the frame of my consciousness.

Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren't you just in another, larger one?

Here, too, a brand-new day is beginning. It could be a day like all the others, or it could be a day remarkable enough in many ways to remain in the memory. In either case, for now, for most people, it is a blank sheet of paper.

[But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.

In any case, suffice it to say I enjoyed hearing about faraway places. I had stocked up a whole store of these places, like a bear getting ready for hibernation. I'd close my eyes, and streets would materialize, rows of houses take shape. I could hear people's voices, feel the gentle, steady rhythm of their lives, those people so distant, whom I'd probably never know.

What I was chasing in circles must have been the tail of the darkness inside me.