Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever.

All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.

There's a psychological mechanism, I've come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live. It would be unbearably obvious that death is inscribed in everything that constitutes life, that any moment of your existence may be only a breath away from being the last. We would be continuously devastated by the magnitude of that inescapable fact. Still, as we mature into our mortality, we begin to gingerly dip our horror-tingling toes into the void, hoping that our mind will somehow ease itself into dying, that God or some other soothing opiate will remain available as we venture into the darkness of non-being.

It seemed that we loved each other better when there were large swaths of two continents between us. The daily work of love was often hard to perform at home.

I loved you because there was no other place for me to go. We were married because we did not know what else to do with each other. You never knew me, nothing about me, what died inside me, what lived invisibly.

Time does nothing but hand you down shabbier and older things.

I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.

When the mind imagines its own lack of power, it is saddened by it.

If my mind and my city were the same thing then I was losing my mind.

While he wanted to teach me what he knew, I wanted him to see what it all looked like for me—perhaps love is a process of finding a common vision of reality.

we wept within the moment that was dividing our life into before and after, whereby the before was forever foreclosed, while the after was spreading out, like an exploding twinkle-star, into a dark universe of pain.

The cafeteria in the Chicago’s Children’s Memorial Hospital basement was the saddest place in the world—and forever it shall be—with its grim neon lights and gray tabletops and the diffuse foreboding of those who stepped away from suffering children to have a grilled cheese sandwich.

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

One of the most common platitudes we heard was that “words failed.” But words were not failing us at all. It was not true that there was no way to describe our experience. We had plenty of language to talk to each other about the horror of what was happening, and talk we did. If there was a communication problem it was that there were too many words; they were far too heavy and too specific to be inflicted upon others. If something was failing it was the functionality of routine, platitudinous language—the comforting clichés were now inapplicable and perfectly useless. We instinctively protected other people from the knowledge we possessed; we let them think that words failed, because we knew they didn’t want to be familiar with the vocabulary we used daily. We were sure they didn’t want to know what we did; we didn’t want to know it either.

Only those who do not care, only those who find a way to diminish or extinguish the value of other human beings, survive wars without damage and speak of warrior honor afterward.

One of the most despicable religious fallacies is that suffering is ennobling, that it is a step on the path to some kind of enlightenment or salvation.

I recognized him then; that is, I finally comprehended what I had known but had never been able to formulate: he had always been complete. He had finished the work of becoming himself, long before any of us could even imagine such a feat was possible.

He drunkenly recognized that the lust was part of something bigger, of a craving to pursue pleasure unreasonably, beyond the right and wrong, to go as far as his body took him. In the body there is no absolute, or free, will, but the body is determined to desire this or that by a cause that is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so on to infinity.

The writer does not dare dream of giving the best of his individuality. No, he must never express his anger. The vacillating demands of mediocrity must be satisfied. Amuse the people, be their clown, give them platitudes about which they can laugh, shadows of truth which they can hold as truths.

I told her I hated normal people and the land of the fucking free and the home of the asshole brave, and I hated God and George and all and everything.

-not only did he deplore the waste of words, he detested the moral lassitude with which they were wasted. To him, in whose throat the bone of displacement was forever stuck, it was wrong to talk about nothing when there was a perpetual shortage of words for all the horrible things that happened in the world. It was better to be silent than to say what didn't matter.

So you are Catholic? Didn't know that.I am nothing, I said. God knows God is no friend of mine. But I envy people who believe in this crap. They don't worry about the meaning of life and things, whereas I do.

One person's garbage is another person's commodity.

Tell the fucking story.

Still, it was fair to say that the minimum requirement for a truly enjoyable existence would be unbridled promiscuity.

Listening to Ella furiously and endlessly unfurl the yarns of the Mingus tales, I understood that the need to tell stories is deeply embedded in our minds, and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative imagination--and therefore fiction--is a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We process the world by telling stories and produce human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves.

Isabel’s indelible absence is now an organ in our bodies whose sole function is a continuous secretion of sorrow.

There are moments in life when it is all turned inside out--what is real becomes unreal, what is unreal becomes tangible, and all your levelheaded efforts to keep a tight ontological control are rendered silly and indulgent.

-the apartment had been directly in the sight line of a Serb sniper across the river. Teta-Jozefina was a devout Catholic, but she somehow managed to believe in essential human goodness, despite all the abundant evidence to the contrary surrounding her. She felt that the sniper was essentially a good man because during the siege, she said, he had often shot over her and her husband's heads to warn them that he was watching and that they shouldn't move so carelessly in their own apartment.

It was a great fucking time, the short era of disaster euphoria, for nothing enhances pleasures and blocks guilt like a looming cataclysm.

I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.

He who recollects a thing by which he was once pleased desires to possess it in the same circumstances as when he first was pleased by it. He who was never pleased is doomed to an eternal hard-on.

The hopeless hope is one of the early harbingers of spring, bespeaking an innocent belief that the world might right its wrongs and reverse its curses simply because the trees are coming into leaf.

What is it with boys? How do they slide into fucked-upness so quickly, with such natural ease?