Time is the water in which we live, and we breathe it like fish. ... Time pours into us and then pours out again. In between the two pourings we live our destiny.

History works itself out in the living.

Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, the place to love and be irritated with.

I tried out the unfamiliar syllables. They fit. They cracked in my ears like a fist through ice.

To think about love and passion and political correctness all together, it doesn't work. Art has to go way past the political to be effective.

We have these earthly bodies. We don't know what they want. Half the time, we pretend they are under our mental thumb, but that is the illusion of the healthy and the protected. Of sedate lovers. For the body has emotions it conceives and carries through without concern for anyone or anything else. Love is one of those, I guess. Going back to something very old knit into the brain as we were growing. Hopeless. Scorching. Ordinary.

...which causes me to wonder, my own purpose on so many days as humble as the spider's, what is beautiful that I make? What is elegant? What feeds the world?