It's kind of a test, Mary, and it's the only kind that amounts to anything. When something rotten like this happens, then you have your choice. You start to really be alive, or you start to die. That's all.

All of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is

And somewhat as in blind night, on a mild sea, a sailor may be made aware of an iceberg, fanged and mortal, bearing invisibly near, by the unwarned charm of its breath, nothingness now revealed itself: that permanent night upon which the stars in their expiring generations are less than the glinting of gnats, and nebulae, more trivial than winter breath; that darkness in which eternity lies bent and pale, a dead snake in a jar, and infinity is the sparkling of a wren blown out to sea; that inconceivable chasm of invulnerable silence in which cataclysms of galaxies rave mute as amber.

I suspect the fault...is in me: that I hate any job on earth, as a job and a hindrance and a semi-suicide.

This continent, an open palm spread frank before the sky.

The camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time.

God doesn't believe in the easy way.