I don't think you're dying," I said. "I think you've just got a touch of cancer. He smiled. Gallows humor.

Imagine others complexly.

Coal miners don't get coal miners' block.

But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel ... it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended.

there is no best and no worst, ...those judgments have no real meaning because there is only what is

The miracle and hope of human consciousness is that we can still conceive of boundlessness.

But that wasn't quite right. I called it a nine because I was saving my ten. And here it was, the great and terrible ten, slamming me again and again as I lay still and alone in my bed staring at the ceiling, the waves tossing me against the rocks then pulling me back out to sea so they could launch me again into the jagged face of the cliff, leaving me floating faceup on the water, undrowned.