Most people ended up, after only a couple of months, so far away from where they'd intended to go, stuck in some barbed underbrush of a quagmire when they'd meant to head straight to the ocean.

I was aware too how strange adults were, how theirs lives were vaster than they wanted anyone to realize, that they actually stretched on and on like deserts, dry and desolate, with an unpredictable, shifting sea of dunes.

We're living longer, we social network alone with our screens, and our depth of feeling gets shallower. Soon it'll be nothing but a tide pool, then a thimble of water, then a micro drop.

…deep-diving love, a love that excavates you. It’s something you have to have before you die in order to have lived.

I haven't always been a writer and I suppose I tiptoed around the idea of writing full time, because it's so isolating.

Just when you think you've hit rock bottom, you realize you're standing on another trapdoor.

Sometimes it takes more courage not to let yourself see. Sometimes knowledge is damaging - not enlightenment but enleadenment. If one recognizes the difference and prepares oneself - it is extraordinarily brave. Because when it comes to certain human miseries, the only witnesses should be the pavement and maybe the trees. (Gareth van Meer)