“Me and my wife had somehow finally reached a moment in which our lives made sense, in which we were comfortable in certain material ways, and in that very moment we were faced with a medical situation that could only really be resolved with death or time.”

I think something many of us grapple with are those times we dread the practice of writing, no matter the project.

Life versus Death, the absolute randomness of one’s position, privilege, and place, the lot one draws, and so on. It has made previously suspicious-seeming clichés seem more tolerable.

Love may not be all you need, but it is certainly a necessity. My desire to survive has been exponentially magnified by the fact that there is someone intimately tangled up in me who would be left alone with the world.

Me and my wife were interested in avoiding style, in eliminating voice, in getting away from the poetry logics, textures, and propulsions that we normally employ in our writing. But we arrived at even this organically and separately.

The illness has only made certain ambivalences I’d always been conscious of that much more acute.

Suddenly we had become these people who didn’t drink anything but kale, who ended many of our conversations with tears, and for whom no future was guaranteed. It was kind of funny.

True self-discovery begins where your comfort zone ends.

Tell us please, what treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?”….I met his gaze and I did not blink. “Words of comfort,” I said to my father.

For death betimes is comfort, not dismay, and who can rightly die needs no delay.

If it were possible to meet the Beloved while laughing and in a state of comfort, why should one suffer the anguish of separation?

Pray to God that your attachment to such transitory things as wealth, name, and creature comforts may become less and less every day.

Let no day slip over without some comfort received from the mouth of God.

Anyone can live contentedly in circumstances of ease and comfort, health and well-being gratification and felicit

Take something from yourself, to give to another, that is humane and gentle and never takes away as much comfort as it brings again.