“When it was all gone, the dream of floating toward bursting stars, and the flesh returned to hold my blood in its prosaic channels, when the room returned, the dirty sordid room, the vacant meaningless ceiling, the weary wasted world, I felt nothing but the old sense of guilt, the sense of crime and violation, the sin of destruction.”

“When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life.”

“The saint is the man who acts as if he had died and returned to life; having already ceased to be "himself" in the earthly sense, he has no intention whatever of returning to that dream, but maintains himself in a kind of wakefulness, which the world with its narrowness and impurities cannot understand.”

“In the morning when I closed my eyesYou were sleeping in paradiseAnd while the room was growing lightI was holding still with all my might”

“A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.”

“I don't want more sense!" I said loudly, beating against the silence of the room. "Not if sense means I'll stop loving anyone. What is there besides people that's worth holding on to?”

“All phenomena are real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense.”

“At the age of twenty six I am in the condition of an aged person — all my old friends are gone … & my heart fails when I think by how few ties I hold to the world….”

“Part of me felt like something momentous was about to happen. The other part of me expected to wake up at any moment, to come out of this fever dream or stress episode or whatever it was and wake up with my face in a puddle of drool on the Smart Aid break room table and think, Well, that was strange, and then return to the boring old business of being me. But I didn't wake up.”

“If I sit for a while, then my impatience, crossness, frustration, are indeed annihilated, and my sense of humor returns.”