To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.

There's a general impulse to distract the grieving person - as if you could.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.

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.

Time is the school in which we learn.

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