I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I'd studied a thing in school I assumed it was general knowledge. I hadn't yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with it, and that the people I knew appeared to me at a different angle from the one at which they appeared to themselves; and that the reverse was also true. I was smaller to others, up there in my balloon, than I was to myself. I was also blurrier.

My father was a forest entomologist, which means he was aware that spraying forests for spruce budworm was counterproductive in that it didn't really work, and it killed everything else in the forests, and it wasn't good for the people who were exposed to it, either. So he was an early proponent of not doing that, but, of course, nobody listened.

This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year's threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future; the place of caught breath.

I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and that we are all members of it.

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being.