Mourning has its place but also its limits.

we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.

I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.

I do have a strong sense of an order in the universe.

It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.

Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

Writing is the act of saying "I," of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying "listen to me, see it my way, change your mind."