In the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen.

In the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen.

I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.

God pity the poor novelist.

Perhaps sound is only an insanity of silence, a mad gibber of empty space grown fearful of listening to itself and hearing nothing.

And again it snowed, and again the sun came out. In the mornings on the way to the station Franklin counted the new snowmen that had sprung up mysteriously overnight or the old ones that had been stricken with disease and lay cracked apart-a head here, a broken body and three lumps of coal there-and one day he looked up from a piece of snow-colored rice paper and knew he was done. It was as simple as that: you bent over your work night after night, and one day you were done. Snow still lay in dirty streaks on the ground but clusters of yellow-green flowers hung from the sugar maples.

I’m pleased by anything in myself that strikes me as not myself.