We had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things.

I tried not to think about my life. I did not have any good solid plans for it long-term - no bad plans either, no plans at all - and the lostness of that, compared with the clear ambitions of my friends (marriage, children, law school), sometimes shamed me. Other times in my mind I defended such a condition as morally and intellectually superior - my life was open and ready and free - but that did not make it less lonely.

Surrealism could not be made up. It was the very electricity of the real.

One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.

No matter what terror the earth could produce - winds, seas - a person could produce the same, lived with the same, lived with all that mixed-up nature swirling inside, every bit. There was nothing as complex in the world - no flower or stone - as a single hello from a human being.

Sometimes I ask myself if writing novels is even respectable.

They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.