I work every day. Sometimes I don't accomplish anything every day, but if I don't work every day, I get depressed and get afraid to start again. So I do something every day.

We were that generation called silent, but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate.

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing.

The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.

Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.

Right there is the usefulness of migraine, there in that imposed yoga, the concentration on the pain. For when the pain recedes, ten or twelve hours later, everything goes with it, all the hidden resentments, all the vain anxieties. The migraine has acted as a circuit breaker, and the fuses have emerged intact. There is a pleasant convalescent euphoria.