Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.

We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.

Can we ever break free of the devices and desires of our own hearts? Might not our conscience be telling us what we most want to hear?

Most of my life I have needed more time to be on my own.

to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

Metaphysical speculation is about as pointless as a discussion on the meaning of one's lungs. They're for breathing.

Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.