Nothing I have ever written has been admired as much as the announcement of my death.

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.

Fear is the cancer

Writers possess magic. It's in their w

It looks like the future's really bright.

Please don't tell me there's no need to worry, it's the only thing I'm any good at.

If you choose, you can influence every aspect of your brain, and therefore every aspect of your life.

The free world knows, out of the bitter wisdom of experience, that vigilance and sacrifice are the price of liberty.

The California cemeteries make dying sound so attractive it's a real effort to keep breathing.

I'm not stereotypically Canadian. I don't really follow hockey. I don't feel like anything other than myself, basically.

Women are never landlocked: they're always mere minutes away from the briny deep of tears.

You never knew about people, like you never knew how deep a pond was because all you saw was the top.