Debbie Foster

…none of us really believe in our own demise. Some things are so vast or overwhelming that we effectively pretend they aren't there until reality forcefully obtrudes and our defences crumble.

The size of the place made the back of his neck tingle with a sort of anti-claustrophobia, his innate understanding of the right and proper scale of things constantly mocked and undermined in every direction that he stared.

Fiction may represent and inform a changing reality: it can contribute to the disruption of that feedback loop. But it can't change reality on its own, by itself.

He felt like the face on the back of a coin being tossed in the air. It could go either way, but the whole thing had a bitter taste of destiny to it, as if the coin had already landed and everybody else knew the result.

Decades earlier, I'd moved to Japan in part because it was the most inward and subtle culture I'd met: the relation of surface to depth remains beguilingly uncertain there and I can never begin to imagine I can get to the bottom of things. Yet my neighbors around Kyoto hold on to their privacy by saying little and expressing, with their faces, even

I'm inspired in different ways by languages that are more similar to Japanese and more distant. Sometimes when I look at Chinese, I'm overcome by an odd "lag," like I should understand it but I don't. It almost feels like I'm dreaming.

One of the main components of the modern idea of the self is interiority or inwardness, the feeling that there is a personal inner space that we alone have access to.

tautologies are not the same thing as paradoxes.

There is no first-person point of view.

Our access to our own thoughts is just as indirect and fallible as our access to the thoughts of other people. We have no privileged access to our own minds. If our thoughts give the real meaning of our actions, our words, our lives, then we can’t ever be sure what we say or do, or for that matter, what we