Death is unbearable unless you can get beyond the I.

The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.

The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.

Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.

It's beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake.

The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism.

Sanity is a cozy lie.