Life in general in my experience gets deeper and deeper, more and more profound, more and more complex, the older one gets.

So many words get lost. They leave the mouthand lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days you can hear their chorus rushing past.

Empty teacups gathered around her and dictionary pages fell at her feet.

He held my hand and told me a story about when he was six and threw a rock at a kid's head who was bullying his brother, and how after that no one had bothered either of them again. 'You have to stick up for yourself,' he told me. 'But it's bad to throw rocks,' I said. 'I know. You're smarter than me. You'll find something better than rocks.

In one's youth, one has tremendous access to one's feelings. And as one gets older, some of those feelings kind of drift away. But so much more happens to you. There's more at stake in life.

That powers my desire to write: the sense of how quickly everything on the surface of life can be cut away and you can suddenly be inside the most inner part of the most inner life of a person. What does it feel like there, and what are the regrets and sensations and longings, and what is the music of it?

All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist