to have been on earth just once

“…But if you have no part in the world, no matter how diseased the world is, you are dead. It is not enough to earn your living, do no actual harm to anyone, tell no lies (so as not to be responsible ever for any treachery however small), help a few people with money or kindness when the occasion presents – and without too great hardship to oneself. It is not enough. It is okay. It is not dirty. But it is dead. […] And one must remain involved in all mankind, even uselessly, and even if one is intellectually conditioned to doubt and despair. Otherwise one might as well be dead.”

“We must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance.”

“Imagine the emptiness in you, the vast cavities you have spent your life trying to fill—with fathers, mothers, lovers, language, drugs, money, art, praise—and imagine them gone. What’s left? Whatever you aren’t, which is what makes you—a house useful not because its floorboards or ceilings or walls, but because the empty space between them.”

“Consider touch the closest thing we have to manifesting the divine. Flesh as terrain. As in: in the beginning there was matter so supple it melted the mind’s body.”

“I am not here. I have no face. Other people have faces…Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second.”