Life is a process of one goneness after another.

I'll never retire. They'll have to take my computer out of my cold, dead hands. I'm addicted to writing. I feel physically unwell if I'm not doing it.

When you suffer an attack of nerves you're being attacked by the nervous system. What chance has a man got against a system?.

More and more I'm aware that the permutations are not unlimited.

And now it seems she's on my wavelength. That's all I need. My mind isn't much of a comfort to me but at least I thought it was private.

Too-lateness, I realized, has nothing to do with age. It’s a relation of self to the moment. Or not, depending on the person and the moment. Perhaps there even comes a time when it’s no longer too late for anything. Perhaps, even, most times are too early for most things, and most of life has to go by before it’s time for almost anything and too late for almost nothing. Nothing to lose, the present moment to gain, the integration with long-delayed Now.

An ordinary mirror is silvered at the back but the window of the night train has darkness behind the glass. My face and the faces of other travellers were now mirrored on this darkness in a succession of stillnesses. Consider this, said the darkness: any motion at any speed is a succession of stillnesses; any section through an action will show just such a plane of stillness as this dark window in which your seeking face is mirrored. And in each plane of stillness is the moment of clarity that makes you responsible for what you do.