“My thoughts, normally bunched together, wrapped in gauze, insistent, urgent, impatient, one moment to the next, living in what I now realize is, in essence, a constant, state or emergency (as if my evolutionary instincts of fight or flight have gone haywire, leading me to spend each morning, noon, and evening in a low-grade but absolutely never-ceasing muted form of panic), those rushed and ragged thoughts are now falling away, one by one, revealing themselves for what they are: the same thought over and over again.”

“I had forgotten: this is what it feels like to live in time. The lurching forward, the sensation of falling of a cliff into darkness, and then landing abruptly, surprised, confused, and then starting the whole process again in the next moment, doing that over and over again, falling into each instant of time and then climbing back up only to repeat the process.”

“What is this called, what I am doing, to myself, to my life, this wallowing, this pondering, this rolling over and over in the same places of my memory, wearing them thin, wearing them out? Why don't I ever learn? Why don't I ever do anything different?”

“You live like this long enough, a life without chances, you lose your bearings. A life without danger. A life without the risk of Now. In any event, what do I need with Now? Now, I think, is overrated. Now hasn’t been working out so great for me. Now never has.”

“Tonight, I feel small. An entire night in the city seems to be too much for me, too immense for me to get lost in. By now it's past one, the after-hours city is in full swing, and morning is a long way off.”

“If I could tell him just one thing, wherever he is, pass him one message, it would be this: he had something. Something to his thoughts, his ideas, the papers in his notebooks, the work we did in the garage. Beyond just a purity to his ideas, a sincerity to his belief, a genuine curiosity, a determination that, if he just sat there long enough, thought hard enough, failed enough times, he'd find a way in.”

“This, then, is my choice:I can allow the events of my life to happen to me.Or I can take those very same actions and make them my own. I can live in my own present, risk failure, be assured of failure.”