Grammar is a piano I play by ear.

I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.

I've always been fascinated with marine geography and how deep things are. I was spellbound by the tsunami, for example, by the actual maps. There is just something about the unseen bottom of the sea that has always fascinated me, how deep is it.

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.

I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.

We are repeatedly left, in other words, with no further focus than ourselves, a source from which self-pity naturally flows. Each time this happens I am struck again by the permanent impassibility of the divide. Some people who have lost a husband or a wife report feeling that person's presence, receiving that person's advice. Some report actual sightings, what Freud described in "Mourning and Melancholia" as "a clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis." Others describe not a visible apparition but just a "very strongly felt presence."

Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.