I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.

There are times when the most practical thing is to lie down.

It is a joy to be choked with thought.

The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business.

Death is the black backing on the mirror that allows us to see anything at all.

How should I know why! I didn't invent human beings, Iggy.

Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.