I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I'd never seen before in my life.

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it.

So learn about life. Cut yourself a big slice with the silver server, a big slice of pie. Open your eyes. Let life happen.

Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.

My life is a discipline, a prison: I live for my own work, without which I am nothing.

Perhaps you considered yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. I am none the wiser.