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

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.

Those who claim to write about something larger and more significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the dimensions of self.

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.

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