We write to make sense of it all.

Expose a child to a particular environment at this susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies.

Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?

Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?

You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.

There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance, said the Ellen Ward of my dream, that woman I hate and fear. I am sure she meant some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning together from the vertical which produces the false arch.

There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences