The idea of death robs inquiry of its passionate vitality and empties our efforts of their purpose by coming to one predestined conclusion, death. Why inquire if you already know the answer?

The Greek idea of fate is moira, which means "portion." Fate rules a portion of your life. But there is more to life than just fate. There is also genetics, environment, economics, and so on. So it's not all written in the book before you get here, such that you don't have to do anything. That's fatalism.

The easy path of aging is to become a thick-skinned, unbudging curmudgeon, a battle-ax. To grow soft and sweet is the harder way.

To see the angel in the malady requires an eye for the invisible, a certain blinding of one eye and an opening of the other to elsewhere.

Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us.

Our lives are determined less by our childhood than by the traumatic way we have learned to remember our childhoods.

To hope for nothing, to expect nothing, to demand nothing. This is analytical despair.