Debbie Foster

"Disease can manifest at four different levels: the physical (diarrhea, heart palpitations, facial tics, postural changes, etc.); the emotional (fantasies, illusions, destructive patterns of behavior, etc.); the mental (obsessions, compulsions, schizothymia, paranoia, etc.); and the spiritual (indolence, indifference, bitterness, accidie, loss of

… ‘genius' functions as a mythology rather than an objective category. A genius needs a story as well as achievements.

It was a kiss that, in the Escher staircase of his dream, happened in the present, the past, and the future at once, a kiss that unlocked a thousand possibilities.

"God veil our faults,' as the old folks say. A simple, much overused prayer. But what little wisdom it contains. A philosophy of sorts. I love how modest it is. I mean, they could have said, 'God erase our faults.' Now that would've been ambitious. But ‘veiľ is better. It presupposes that to live a life is to have faults, that no one is perfect and

this is precisely how “prophecy” works—it is always self-fulfilling.

She was asking me to describe myself as if I was a horse I owned when actually I was more like a radio program, an ongoing narration that I could barely recall.

Psychologists suggest that suffering nostalgics do not really want to possess the lost object, they only want to preserve the bittersweet desire for it. Actually retrieving it or accepting its loss would rob them of a feeling they have structured their lives around. They are stuck, and their resistance to getting unstuck is tenacious, since it

The phrases I have just italicized-catching ourselves, space between, at some level, a part of us, full attention—are feeble and incompatible metaphors we've concocted to make sense of a mystery: that we can be not at one with ourselves, yet somehow still the same.

A book isn't a gym; it doesn't exist for you, to fix you, but for itself alone.