“What happens when an essayist starts imagining things, making things up, filling in blank spaces, or — worse yet — leaving the blanks blank?”

“Sometimes the essay is where we end up when everything that we know must change.”

“Maybe every essay automatically is in some way experimental — less an outline traveling toward a foregone conclusion than an unmapped quest that has sprung from the word 'question'.”

“We start each day with a blank sheet of paper in front of us, and what we write on it is up to us.”

“...when truths disappear, they leave behind blank spaces, and that is also dangerous.”

“the painter, Cezanne, would leave blank spaces on his canvas when he couldn’t account for the brush strokes, or the color”--- “How much of your life can you account for? My life is a collage of unaccounted for brush strokes; I am all random”.”

“The problem with a plan is that you fill up the blank page of a new day with a 'to-do' list before you get there. And if you're not careful there's no room for anything else.A plan, especially a very focused one, narrows down the possibilies of the future to just a couple of things: that things either go to plan, or they don't.”