Chaise profonde

The thinker sinks deep into his or her confusions, begins to see that confusion is the heart of the matter and that life is to be well lived there.

If Buddhism's to be believed--and it's not--it's that we're not who we think we are, just as we're not who we think we are when we think ourselves Christian or Jewish or Muslim; that is, as children of a god who loves us and who may or may not be here. (Hindu's may have matters straight after all.)

And children have every right to be scared.

All literature is make-believe; the more realistic it purports to be the more fantastic it is.

If a novel must contain at least fifty thousand words, a poem must have at least two.

Not so long ago there was a woman named Gertrude Stein. There are photographs that prove she existed. She looks so old in them, a black and white dumpling usually sitting in a black and white room with high black and white ceilings and black and white paintings by Picasso and Matisse. By the looks of the photographs it looks as if Gertrude Stein might already have been dead when they were taken, or, at the very least, that she lived in an age of pre-history, perhaps slightly after Lascaux.

However, if you were to take up her masterpiece, "The Making of Americans" you would find it to be so new as to be unreadable.