You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.” I watch light climb into the rounded summits of high-altitude

Babette, disheveled, has the careless dignity of someone too preoccupied with serious matters to know or care what she looks like.

“Whatever relaxes you is dangerous. If you don’t know that, I might as well be talking to the wall.”

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.

How serious can it be if it happens all the time? Isn’t the definition of a serious event based on the fact that it’s not an everyday occurrence?

He was a gaunt young man who seemed suspicious of conversation that strayed outside certain unspecified guidelines.

In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.

It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.