It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.

When the ground starts moving, all bets are off.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it

I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost.

I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.

But the fact of it was that I liked it out there, a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusions, an empty place reclaimed by the weather where a woman plays an organ to stop the wind's whining and an old man plays ball with a dog named Duke. I could tell you that I came back because I had promises to keep, but maybe it was because nobody asked me to stay.