I admire cool renderings of hot topics.

If complete enlightenment demands relinquishing the self, then complete enlightenment implies the acceptance of mortality. Not that there isn’t more to being enlightened than accepting that our lives are brief and end when we did. But I do think it’s a requirement.

Who’s normal? Normal is a mathematical concept. It has no bearing on human personality or relationships.

There must be many of us whose lives have been divided into a before and after, with an accident, a death, a crime, a crisis, some moment or year or relationship that came between and changed everything. I want to see how your life moved forward from that point of division.

And now you’ll never be able to have anyone else, because you won’t be able to keep our secret. You’ll tell whoever it is, and once he knows, he’ll leave you.

Someday a sentence will come to me, a magic sentence that will undo all that is wrong and make everything right. But until that sentence comes, I say nothing.

I don’t go to graduate school. Instead, I move to New York, the city where I naively imagine writers must go.

The three of us spend much of our week together at art museums and botanic gardens and other tourist attractions. We are drawn to these places of silent staring and confused, enervated wandering because they make us seem and feel less like freaks as we stare in speechless shock at one another.

Prophecy, annunciation, virginity. A hidden sword, an angel bearing a crown of jewels. An army of knights, a cloud of butterflies, a phallic arrow that missed its mark. A tower cell, an evil bishop, a king’s betrayal. A heart that would not burn, a dove that flew from the flames that failed to dispatch that immortal heart.

The road always stretches endlessly ahead and behind us, so that we are out of time as well as out of place.