Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.

A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.

You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose... That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?

Paradise is for those who make paradise.

Genre is a useful concept only when used not evaluatively but descriptively.

If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.