Why can I never set my heart on a possible thing?

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else

Alone, no one wins freedom.

When I'm writing I don't dream much; it's like the dreaming gets used in the writing.

Hope is a slow business.

And I needed a rock. Something to hold onto, to stand on. Something solid. Because everything was going soft, turning into mush, into marsh, into fog. Fog closing in on all sides. I didn't know where I was at all.

The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.