Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose. - Joyce Carol Oates

You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There's a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can't alter.

It's one of those secrets that's embarrassing to acknowledge, but we do love our students.

you're an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary otherwise; you have to examine such minerals in the absence of light to discover their beauty, you tell yourself.