My fingers curl through the holes in the wicker, through the wet grass beneath it, trying to hold tight to the sharp blades of the present. Somewhere in my brain a sinkhole is bubbling over, and each bubble contains a scene from a tiny sunken world ... I have never been the prophet of my own past before. It makes me wonder how the healthy dreamers can bear to sleep at all, if sleep means that you have to peer into that sinkhole by yourself. ... I had almost forgotten this occipital sorrow, the way you are so alone with the things you see in dreams.

At the end of the block where I used to live in Coconut Grove in Miami, there's a swampy area, a no-name alcove with a little mangrove estuary. It's beautiful.

A single note, held in an amber suspension of time, like a charcoal drawing of Icarus falling. It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity. It went on and on, until my own lungs were burning. “What bird are you calling?” I asked finally, when I couldn’t stand it any longer. The Bird Man stopped whistling. He grinned, so that I could see all his pebbly teeth. “You.

The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.

I want a real encounter with something true and disconcerting about peoples' natures.

Given the brevity of our time here, it does seem likely that our species, too, must have at best a blinkered understanding of the shape of things, the import of certain events and what distinguishes "good" from "bad" luck.

I swim with all my strength. No superhuman surge, or pony heroics; it's just me at my most desperate.