This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.

You can't find peace by avoiding life.

we become the stories we tell ourselves

Man," he said, "I'm not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want." "What do we want?" I asked blurrily. "Aw, man, you know," he said. "We just want, well, the same things these people wanted." "What was that?" He shrugged. "To live, I guess," he said.

Silly humans. Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.

Philip Glass, like [Virginia] Woolf, is more interested in that which continues than he is in that which begins, climaxes, and ends... Glass and Woolf have both broken out of the traditional realm of the story, whether literary or musical, in favor of something more meditative, less neatly delineated, and more true to life. For me, Glass [finds] in three repeated notes something of [a] rapture of sameness.

The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.