When you work at home, fellow alums, discipline is the supreme virtue. Suicidal self-loathing lurks behind every coffee break. Activities must be expertly scheduled, from shopping to showers to panic attacks.

I knew I was in the vicinity of a serious lesson, if not about how to live life, then at least how to put some poetry into your craven retreat from it.

Everything's weird if you stare at it.

Write what you know. Write what you don't know. But most of all, write what you'd rather not know.

People gave names to things so they could tell stories about them, goddam fairy tales about children who got out alive.

Shudder, in fact, is not quite the word for the feeling. Feeling is not quite the word for the feeling. How's bathing at knifepoint in the phlegm of the dead? Is that a feeling?

I'm a citizen of the republic of empathy.