To feel the beauty in all of existence, but not in oneself.

The fire came up the hill faster than I could have imagined.
It was already in the house.
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Three feet of snow in June.
·
All trace of your existence will be wiped from the face of the earth.

Driving back, you remember the hopeful innocent you were just a week ago, still on your way. 

The people around him were often depressed. He was a “carrier.”

Things seem to be picking up at the shop.
Three jobs today.
Total billable hours: .75.
Thy will be done.

“Poland was a rainy place with a lot of crows, man, and it was beautiful.”

My participation in events to which I’d thought myself central, I came to realize, went mostly unnoticed.

As they walked through their friends’ beautiful house, he was saddened to glimpse the exhaustion in his wife’s eyes. For her it had been for poorer, not richer, and in sickness, not health.

What differentiates man from animal: vulgarity.

His dog had lost all respect for him, or could no longer stand his scent. Either way, oil spots on the driveway were of more interest to her, and on the rare occasions they occupied the same room, she abstained from meeting his eye.

Bombast: thoughts and images too great for subject.
Paralysis:

Work that withholds its methods or motives, or is a result of a process unrelated to the final result, or has a clever title that provokes in the viewer an unexpected reassessment, or which through a brutal economy of means affects a disproportionate response, or is so unapologetically stupid that it makes intelligence, craft or elegance seem frivolous.

Thirty years after the loss of their son they still look for him in restaurants—the man at the corner table, laughing with his beautiful wife, waiting for someone to join them.

We were in deep shit, but I was too caught up, strung out, beat down to see it. It was the air we breathed and the ocean we drowned in. Today, looking back, I’m afraid for that young couple. I’m afraid for all of us.

He’d often had the feeling people were laughing at him, and finally understood why.

Over the course of one sunny afternoon a stately ice shelf the size of Connecticut breaks loose and collapses into the ocean. You are dispersing. You have entered the floe.

He received the crushing news with a resignation born of decades of unrealized hopes.

If you make the mistake of asking him something, his eyes glaze over and his mouth twitches into the private smile of a predator who’s just found his victim. Well, he says, that’s an interesting question. In the endless pause that follows, you think, oh shit, we’re in for it now.