“If a birth is the fall-out from the explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half-life is all we can expect. ”

“Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, without that leap nobody comes to life.”

“Is birth always a fall?”

“Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.”

“Can one drown in one's element... If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air?”

“The human race is a life sentence...it's a rough confinement, and sometimes we all need to break out of jail.”

“Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.”