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.

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

Time punishes us by taking everything, but it also saves us - by taking everything

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

Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments - an inability to accept life as ongoing.

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.

Chair or no chair: a binary relation. But the vicissitudes of moving the body around are infinite. You never know what a person in a chair can do.