Discovering, for example, that as witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. [p. 65]

Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.

To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.

I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.

When you’re young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can’t make up their minds. Perhaps it’s a way of admitting that things can’t ever bear the same certainty again.

Irony - The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity.

But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book.