Visible: not a good look for me.

The things you joke about during the day can fill you with dread in the middle of the night.

Still clinging to that imagined professional status, 30 years past its sell date.

Even the simplest form possesses sufficient esthetic complexity for a lifetime of contemplation.

Love of jargon, inversely proportional to love of truth.

I did my best, which is nothing, which is what you’ve come to expect.

Each morning he stepped out, felt the air on his skin, and gave thanks for this new reprieve.

“a large but uncertain quantity of discrete, mostly undated texts left in no sequential order, such that every published edition is necessarily untrue to the nonexistent ‘original.’”

Think about the meaning of any word long enough, and you will lose your mind.

At one celebratory banquet, Mr. Aldrin was breathlessly asked, “Tell us how it really felt to be on the moon!” Afterward, he rushed outside into an alley and wept.

Whatever; if you say so. I grew up poor and afraid. I believe you more than I believe myself.

The house is quiet and cold. The washing machine has stopped working, joining the dead car battery, the leak in the roof, and the broken back window covered with cardboard. You sleep in the dark in the blue chair where, in happier times, your cat once joined you. You are a joke variant of a Hank Williams song, as interpreted by BJ Thomas.

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.