I have produced no children of my own and my husband is dead,” she replied, an acid tone in her voice. “Thus I am more to be pitied than revered. I am expected to give...

You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.

Just because an apple falls one hundred times out of a hundred does not mean it will fall on the hundred and first.

The future is certain. It is just not known.

The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable.

Why are my sons followed thus by darkness?’…’Because they were born in the house of flesh, therefore death follows at their heels.

Anything can happen: anything. Or nothing. Who can say? The world, monstrous, is made that way, and in the end consumes us all. Who am I, administrated or no, to have the audacity to survive...

Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard there’s nothing you can do.

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

You could have kept on driving and never looked back. No one’s ever had to stop for me. Or even hear me. Anyway, you did, and now I’m afraid the time for choice is behind...

The most dangerous ideas are not those that challenge the status quo. The most dangerous ideas are those so embedded in the status quo, so wrapped in a cloud of inevitability, that we forget they...

So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it...

What is about to happen is not the reclaiming of Earth by a triumphant Mother Nature, a karmic repudiation of humanity’s arrogant ill stewardship. Nothing we ever did mattered one way or another. This event...

Too bad for the storytellers. Too bad for the sense makers, the apologists, that nothing, then or ever, nothing was inevitable. It’s just too bad.

In that moment I’m able to accept the inevitability of how I feel, though not with joy. I need to talk to someone. I need to trust someone. And for whatever reason, I know, I...

Part of the apparently conventional nature of our relationships is the threat of separation and death. This body dies. That body dies. We can rejuvenate, feel better, live longer, but, even so, in this world...

This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.

Whether the bear beats the wolf or the wolf beats the bear, the rabbit always loses.

Dissociation of the mind into logic-tight compartments is by no means confined to the population of the asylum. It is a common, and perhaps inevitable, occurrence in the psychology of every human being. Our political...

The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.

Time after time have nations, ay, and rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been, and passed away to be forgotten, so that no memory of them remains. This is but one of several;...

. . .the sorrows of the heart yearn to be erased, for one final atonementfinite and forgetting and whole—but time in its preservingwill not permit forgetting; destroyingonly when we can no longer begor argue with...

What’d you think would happen when you died? That the prophecy would just be over and we’d all be like, oops, guess we got that one wrong?

. . . Thisis not the same river at my fingertips. There are no paths, no sunken roadsfamiliar in the forest, by which we canretrace our steps, by which we can escapeby which we can...

I’m beginning to feel as though everything has happened before, that our story has already been told. Just as we were powerless to stop the fox stealing the chicken, so there seems to be an...

It’s the not-yet in the now, the taste of the fruit that does not-yet exist, hanging the blossom on the bough.