Everyone we've lost, we'll find. Or they'll find us.

Structural dissatisfaction: Returning to circumstances that once pleased you, after having experienced a more thrilling or opulent way of life, and finding that you can no longer tolerate them.

Vinegar: that's what fear smells like.

I've never been that confident. I don't tend to think, swaggeringly, I'm going to ace this. It's just not who I am.

Be willing and unafraid to write badly, because often the bad stuff...forms a base on which to build something better.

I wonder what Proust would have made of our present-day locus of collective fantasy, the Internet. I’m guessing he would have seized on its wistful aspect, pointing out gently and with wry humor that much of what beguiles us is the act of reaching for what isn’t there.

...water laughing softly down a black stone wall.