The longing we have to communicate cleanly and directly with people is always obstructed by qualifications and often with concern about how our messages will be received.
“A poet or prose narrator usually looks back on what he has achieved against a backdrop of the years that have passed, generally finding that some of these achievements are acceptable, while others are less so.”
“If you take one rivet out of an airplane, it will be all right, it'll keep flying. You take another rivet out of the airplane and it still flies. So what the heck, let's take more rivets out of the airplane, and sooner or later, the airplane drops from the sky.”