Robin turned and looked straight into her. "What's life for?" "I don't know." "I don't either. But I don't think it's about winning.

I look at my father, who was in many ways an unhappy person, but who, not long before he got sick, said that the greatest source of satisfaction in his life had been going to work in the company of other workers.

Depression, when it's clinical, is not a metaphor. It runs in families, and it's known to respond to medication and to counseling. However truly you believe there's a sickness to existence that can never be cured, if you're depressed you will sooner or later surrender and say: I just don't want to feel bad anymore. The shift from depressive realism to tragic realism, from being immobilized by darkness to being sustained by it, thus strangely seems to require believing in the possibility of a cure.

You see more sitting still than chasing after.

And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary?

Once there are good sentences on the page, I can feel a loyalty to them and start following their logic, and take refuge from myself.

Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.