One way to know yourself is to remember: to acknowledge that your memory of what you have done, seen, felt, experienced, does belong to you; that the remembered part of life which you carry around inside you is inside you, and, as part of life, once was not.

Not to acknowledge this is not to admit that life. Would that be not to live?

What kind of a savage writes in a book in pen??

'a human solo, a being cold, and lone'

'Each one in turn paying his debt to nature due and leaving the excess to the next link in the name's chain. They began as fur traders, cordwainers, salters and smokers of bacon, went on into glassmaking, became selectmen, builders of tanneries, quarriers of marble. Country for miles around gone to necropolis, gray with marble dust, dust that was the breaths, the ghosts, of all those fake-Athenian monuments going up elsewhere across the Republic. Always elsewhere. The money seeping its way out through stock portfolios more intricate than any genealogy: what stayed at home in Berkshire went into timberland whose diminishing green reaches were converted acres at a clip into paper—toilet paper, banknote stock, newsprint—a medium or ground for shit, money, and the Word. They were not aristocrats, no Slothrop ever made it into the Social Register or the Somerset Club—they carried on their enterprise in silence, assimilated in life to the dynamic that surrounded them thoroughly as in death they would be to churchyard earth. Shit, money, and the Word, the three American truths, powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the country's fate.

But they did not prosper . . . about all they did was persist…'

How strange, after everything that's happened, dogs still bite people.

'I was talking to a friend the other day and telling her how difficult is was sometimes to get down to work. She was so surprised. She thought it was easy and assumed that as all artists love their work all they had to do was just to do it. I explained to her that it wasn't like that at all. It takes so much effort sometimes just to begin and although going on is mostly a pleasure it is also a great effort. And no one cares whether or not you do it. No one asks you to do it and mostly no one wants it when you have done it and although as a creative artist you accept that it mostly has to be like that, nevertheless it is hard. She was surprised.'

'You do not murmur in so many words, I know this doomed to fail and yet persist. No. For the first person singular and a fortiori plural pronoun had never had any place in your vocabulary.'

'In order to be company he must display a certain mental activity. But it need not be of a high order. Indeed it might be argued the lower the better. Up to a point. The lower the order of mental activity the better the company. Up to a point.'

'Q: Why didn't you make it larger so that it would loom over the observer?

A: I was not making a monument.

Q: Then why didn't you make it smaller so that the observer could see over the top?

A: I was not making an object.'