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Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.
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There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.
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Whenever a work's structure is intentionally one of its own themes, another of its themes is art.
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How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
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As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
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Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block.
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The writer studies literature, not the world.
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Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
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Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.
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There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.
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The surest sign of age is loneliness.