To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another's life.

If the book is a mystery to its author as she's writing, inevitably it's going to be a mystery to the reader as he or she reads it.

Forests, which I think do contain a lot mystery and traditionally are the setting for lawlessness and magic and what is outside of the rational to some degree, are still something more finite. I guess the desert and its crushing sense of infinite space is part of its connection to the mystical - on top of making you dehydrated and therefore primed for visions.

If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom you feel distant, your hands sometimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms - i you find yourself at a loss for what do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignnes of your own body - it's because your hands remember a time when the division between mind and body, brain and heart, what's inside and what's outside, was so much less.

When the word 'nostalgia' was coined in the 18th century, it was used to describe a pathology - not so much a sense of lost time, but a severe homesickness.

I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations.

At the end, all that's left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that's why I've never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that's why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived.