A state of chronic powerlessness eats away at a person

There is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.

You couldn’t begin to imagine who I am, where I’m going, or what I’m about to do, All of you are trapped here. You can’t go anywhere, forward or back. But I’m not like you. I have work to do. I have a mission to accomplish. And so, with your permission, I shall move ahead.

As long as I stared at the clock, at least the world remained in motion. Not a very consequential world, but in motion nonetheless. And as long as I knew the world was still in motion, I knew I existed. Not a very consequential existence, but an existence nonetheless. It struck me as wanting that someone should confirm his own existence only by the hands of an electric wall clock. There had to be a more cognitive means of confirmation. But try as I might, nothing less facile came to mind.

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

I just wanted to write something about running, but I realized that to write about my running is to write about my writing. It's a parallel thing in me.

Music always stimulates my imagination. When I'm writing I usually have some Baroque music on low in the background chamber music by Bach, Telemann, and the like.