“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.”

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

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.

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 have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has had to overcome while trying to succeed.

I am no big shot. I am not anybody’s boss. I want to be everybody’s servant.

The faithful believe that certain truths have been ‘revealed.’ The skeptics and secularists believe that truth is only to be sought by free inquiry and trial and error. Only one of those positions is dogmatic.

So a moral position is not a message. A moral position is a passionate caring inside you.

When you find yourself in a position to help someone, be happy because Allah is answering that person’s prayer through you.

I find myself born into this particular position. I’m determined to make the most of it. And to do whatever I can to help. And I hope I leave things behind a little bit better than I found them.

Be neither too remote nor too familiar.

Only the other day I was inquiring of an entire bed of old-fashioned roses, forced to listen to my ramblings on the meaning of the universe as I sat cross-legged in the lotus position in front of them.