“I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.”

“You must want to spend the rest of your life with yourself first.”

“Suffering modifies the image of time. The eruption of suffering cancels out linear time, breaks it, makes it into whirling squiggles. The night of time crouches at the edges of the dawn of today and tomorrow. Suffering casts us down among our single-celled ancestors, among the quarrelsome or terrorized muttering in the caves, among the female divinities expelled into the darkness of the earth, even as we keep ourselves anchored — let’s say — to the computer we’re writing on. Strong feelings are like that: they explode chronology. An emotion is a somersault, a tumble, a dizzying pirouette.”

There isn’t a version of me that could’ve looked away from you.

“An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.”