As a writer, you withdraw and disconnect yourself from the world in order to connect to it in the far-reaching way that is other people elsewhere reading the words that came together in this contemplative state. What is vivid in the writing is not in how it hits the senses but what it does in the imagination;

There’s an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about a hundred years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of time during which something is in living memory. Every event has its saeculum, and then its sunset when the last person who fought in the Spanish C

“They were the kind of people who . . . tack a ‘fucking’ on to every noun,” he wrote in his diary of the experience, “yet I have never seen anything that exceeded their kindness.”

What is it that makes it possible to do the work that is of highest value to others and one’s central purpose in life? It may appear—to others, sometimes even to oneself—trivial, irrelevant, indulgent, pointless, distracted, or any of those other pejoratives with which the quantifiable beats down the unquantifiable.

(There’s a whole history to be written about bohemian aunts and queer uncles, about those family members who swoop down to encourage misfit children in ways their parents won’t or can’t.)

how to make room for the small and subjective inside something big and historic.

“Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Nature itself is immensely political, in how we imagine, interact with, and impact it, though this was not much recognized in his era.

Slashing away at others seemed to be a means of self-definition and self-enhancement that faded away as he grew more confident and more humane as a writer and a person.