#helprin

We are all perfect clocks that the Divinity has set to ticking when, even before birth, the heart explodes into its lifelong dance

As a way to arrive at the truth, exactitude and methodology are, in the end, far inferior to vision and apotheosis.

"There are times for sleep, for inactivity, dreaming, indiscipline, even lethargy. You'll know when you deserve these times. They come after you've been broken. I'm speaking of a helpless, tranquil state before the great excitement of dawn."

Words were all he knew; they possessed and overwhelmed him, as if they were a thousand white cats with whom he once shared a one-room apartment. (In fact, he did not like cats, because they could not talk and would not listen.)