Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all.

Part of the work of writing a novel is to uncover the symmetries or connections that make it whole, which might not reveal itself at first.

She was gone, and all that was left was the space you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence. For a long time, it remained hollow. Years, maybe. And when at last it was filled again, you knew that the new love you felt for a woman would have been impossible without Alma. If it weren't for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill 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

He spoke of human solitude, about the intrinsic loneliness of a sophisticated mind, one that is capable of reason and poetry but which grasps at straws when it comes to understanding another, a mind aware of the impossibility of absolute understanding. The difficulty of having a mind that understands that it will always be misunderstood.

I scowled at the world. And the world scowled back. We were locked in a stare of mutual disgust.

I'm very interested in structure, how multiple stories are assembled in different ways; that is what memory does as well.