I am startled when people are themselves and are not my thoughts of them.

God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely and perfectly real, without miracle—or instruction.

I look upon another's insistence on the merits of his or her life - duties, intellect, accomplishment - and see that most of it is nonsense.

It is like visiting one's funeral, like visiting loss in its purest and most monumental form, this wild darkness, which is not only unknown but which one cannot enter as oneself.

Memory, so complete and clear or so evasive, has to be ended, has to be put aside, as if one were leaving a chapel and bringing the prayer to an end in one's head.

I am in an adolescence in reverse, as mysterious as the first, except that this time I feel it as a decay of the odds that I might live for a while, that I can sleep it off.

Public radio is alive and kicking, it always has been

Death and I are head to head in a total collision, pure and mutual distaste.

Being ill like this combines shock - this time I will die - with a pain and agony that are unfamiliar, that wrench me out of myself.

True stories, autobiographical stories, like some novels, begin long ago, before the acts in the account, before the birth of some of the people in the tale.

I feel sorry for the man who marries you... because everyone thinks you're sweet and you're not.

Work while you have strength.

You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.

I knew that even if I was able to call for help, I was in a place so remote that it wasn't likely there would be anyone who could help me. And even if there were, it could take weeks.

Still, it will sometimes strike a scientific man that the philosophers have been less intent on finding out what the facts are, than on inquiring what belief is most in harmony with their system.

Crooks are early adopters.

Maybe he was Filipino. Was that in Asia? Probably. Asia's out-of-control huge.

The President is aware of what is going on. That is not to say that something is going on.

I am in every religion as the thread through a string of pearls. Wherever thou seest extraordinary holiness and extraordinary power raising and purifying humanity, know thou that I am there.

I talk to the universe all the time.

The vast majority of all consequences, especially in 21st century America, are completely meaningless bullshit.