The vastness of his inner desolation was grotesquely disproportionate to his worldly significance.

Another evening of mutual assured destruction.

He had a hard time listening to people whose voices sounded as if they knew they were likable.

Going through her things, they came upon a note.
It said: I’d kill for a cigarette, or half an hour of sleep.

Dinner with an old friend and his younger wife. She is lovely and shy, and in compensation you are more outgoing than usual. As you launch into another story about your friend as you knew him in college, a look passes between them and he squeezes her hand. You realize that her reticence is actually boredom and that dinner is, for them, an obligation to be endured as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Thoughts seemed to harbor great peril, but their absence even more.

All night I thought I heard her calling out. Of course, that was impossible. Her voice by now was down to palest air. But I still hear it everywhere.

Realizing gradually, then all of a sudden, all of the stuff that’s never going to happen.

The possibility of something else entirely.
To be nothing. To be as nothing.

In the days before Christmas we got tired of having no money. We sold everything at a loss, took the cash and headed south.

Let it go. The world doesn’t need another photograph.