Impossible Owls: Essays

that suffocating childish escape wish that’s the wake of a certain type of fantasy. That feeling that in a different world you’d be yourself.

Small imperfections, which make a work human, make it beautiful. “If my hands shake,” he says as he talks about this, “it is not because I am an alcoholic. It’s because I’m honest!”

What overwhelms is not the meaninglessness of the universe but the coexistence of an apparent meaninglessness with the astonishing interconnectedness of everything.

When everything can vanish, you make a sport out of not vanishing. You submit yourself to the forces that could erase you from the earth, and then you turn up at the end, not erased.

Vance, a big friendly fist of a guy

there was a mordant New England pluck in the way he gazed into the abyss and said, “I see what you’re trying to do there, abyss.”

and he had white hair and a smile so enthusiastic it hinted at actual anarchy.