Only sometimes you can't feel anything about a subject without hypothesizing its extinction.

Love isn’t a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts.

For, how else to seize such an instant? How to shout out into the empty air just the right words, and on cue? Frame a moment to last a lifetime?

Theres a lot to be said for doing what youre not supposed to do, and the rewards of doing what youre supposed to do are more subtle and take longer to become apparent, which maybe makes it less attractive. But your life is the blueprint you make after the building is built.

I don't want to be taken to Bhutan and smell the flowers. I want to be told something I couldn't have been told any other way.

I'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.

Until you can become accountable to yourself and only yourself, you're probably not going to live a fully vital life. So much of literature is about accountability. The moral issues in most novels are about people becoming responsible for their own behaviour. One of the forces against being responsible for your own behaviour is the force of the past, in the way that the past tries to form you.