The best thing about time passing is the privilege of running out of it, of watching the wave of mortality break over me and everyone I know.

Those who claim to write about something larger and more significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the dimensions of self.

Chair or no chair: a binary relation. But the vicissitudes of moving the body around are infinite. You never know what a person in a chair can do.

Around you move many seas. It is impossible not to drown a little.

If you think something's happened quickly, you're looking at only a part of it.

Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments - an inability to accept life as ongoing.

Time punishes us by taking everything, but it also saves us - by taking everything

You can't learn from remembering. You can't learn from guessing. You can learn only from moving forward at the rate you are moved, as brightness into brightness.

The catalog of emotion that disappears when someone dies, and the degree to which we rely on a few people to record something of what life was to them, is almost too much to bear.

The more you talk about something, the less accurate it gets.

I don't write toward a genre, and I try not to make claim to a genre after a book is published. That said, The Guardians isn't poetry. It's prose.

We never grow closer to God when we just live life. It takes deliberate pursuit and attentiveness.

Take responsibility for making conscious choices.

Phoenix, Arizona: an oasis of ugliness in the midst of a beautiful wasteland.

You can forget anything, and actually being a part of a crowd, of a group, can itself be freeing.

The Beatles and the Stones are for blowing your mind. The Doors are for afterward, when your mind is already gone . . .

I've always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I'm wrong, but I won't change.

Great vices are the proper objects of our detestation, smaller faults of our pity, but affectation appears to be the only true source of the ridiculous.

I will not be a traitor of God to please the whole world.

Failure will not overcome me so long as my will to succeed is stronger

Only the individual can decide what level of risk she can tolerate and what level of freedom she's willing to sacrifice for the sake of safety.