Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?

Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.

Who'll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.

The faith in an afterlife, however much our reason ridicules it, very modestly extends our faith that each moment of our consciousness will be followed by another - that a coherent matrix has been prepared for this precious self of ours. The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, of what we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.

Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.

Life. Too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.

Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.