I like people who possess either deep mastery or deep empathy, but not as much as I like those who possess both.

This is suffering's lesson: pay attention. The important part might come in a form you do not recognize.

Look at me, dancing my little dance for a few moments against the background of eternity.

Around you move many seas. It is impossible not to drown a little.

The best thing about time passing is the privilege of running out of it, of watching the wave of mortality break over me and everyone I know.

I don't write toward a genre, and I try not to make claim to a genre after a book is published. That said, The Guardians isn't poetry. It's prose.

My existence shrank from an arrow of light pointing into the future forever to a speck of light that was the present moment. I got better at living in that point of light, making the world into that point. I paid close attention to it. I loved it very much.