In no other sport is the connection between performer and observer so intimate, so frequently painful, so unresolved

Flying fosters fantasies of childhood, of omnipotence, rapid shifts of being, miraculous moments; it stirs our capacity for dreaming.

Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete.

Like most people, I can be very easily hurt.

In families there are frequently matters of which no one speaks, nor even alludes. There are no words for these matters. As the binding skeleton beneath the flesh is never acknowledged by us and, when at last it defines itself, is after all an obscenity.

When you give up struggle, there's a kind of love.

It makes me angry sometimes, it's a visceral thing--how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren't genuine, but because they are; because you've said them so many times, your 'principles,' your 'ideals'--and so damned little in the world has changed because of them.