The claw of the magnolia, drunk on its own scents, asks nothing of life.

It is awful to want to go away and to want to go nowhere.

* to know a lot of people I love pieces of, and to want to synthesize those pieces in me somehow, be it by painting or writing. * to know that millions of others are unhappy and that life is a gentleman's agreement to grin and paint your face gay so others will feel they are silly to be unhappy, and try to catch the contagion of joy, while inside so many are dying of bitterness and unfulfillment.

A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.

There is more than one good way to drown.

…beating time along the edge of thought.

Is there no way out of the mind?