"The dilemma is, in the United States, each penniless citizen believes that, with luck, he might become a millionaire; and so doesn't want to put res… - Joyce Carol Oates

....whatever you do, with whom you do it or whether you do it alone, and when, and how, and why, to what mysterious end — it's balanced against nothing, against Death and forgetting. You balanced against oblivion.

What you call your personality, you know? — it's not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been.

Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day.