Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think what it might be. In running the mind flies with the body; the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.

Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.

Even as a young child, I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred temple, books might safely reside.

The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought.

When one crosses over from an activity, or the verb, of writing or doing, and becomes a noun, like "a writer" I think that is an act of supreme self-consciousness that I've never, in effect, made. I write, but I don't like to think of myself as a writer. I think it's somewhat self-aggrandizing and pretentious. Now, I am a teacher.

Whoever's reading this, if anyone is reading it: does it matter that our old selves are lost to us as surely as the past is lost, or is it enough to know yes we lived then, and we are living now, and the connection must be there? Like a river hundreds of miles long exists both at its source and at its mouth, simultaneously?