Memoir from Antproof Case

When faced with something I fear, I tend to eat spaghetti.

...what argument is left with someone you love if she is willing to break your heart?

Whatever I do I've always done not because I want something but to compensate for a loss, to bring about a balance, to create amends, to make things right.

One thing you will discover is that life is based less than you think on what you've learned and much more than you think on what you have inside you from the beginning.

We are all perfect clocks that the Divinity has set to ticking when, even before birth, the heart explodes into its lifelong dance.

The greatest blizzards start with the finest snow.

Sometimes love is taken away unjustly, but not until the very end do you stop believing and then it is very bitter. It is bitter because somewhere within you the perfect standard still lives, the pure expectation against which failure and betrayal are contrasted like the dark shadows on a moonlit road.

What I did with his automobile was fairly dramatic and somewhat risky, but still a lot easier than finding a parking place on the Upper East Side.

But the long tunnels of art through which I walked in Rome that day had no ragged edges, cowardly colors, or shades of pastel that didn't know what to do with themselves. The wisdom, perfection, and beauty of the colors and forms I passed were more than enough, in their collectivity, to hint at the principles which govern the hereafter, whatever that may be. Indeed, even a detail of one painting can offer solid direction in this regard if one knows how to look

I made a boy's mistake, common enough, of thinking that real life was knowing many things and many people, living dangerously in faraway places, crossing the sea, or starting a power company on the Columbia River, a steamship line in Bolivia.

has never varied. To protect, and to protect, and to protect. I was born to protect the ones I love. And may God continue to give me ways to protect and serve them, even though they are gone.

They will know failure and triumph intertwining, locked in a braid of life and death. But eventually they will sit in a quiet room and understand that the bright days and fiercely contested struggles have been solely for the purpose of bringing them to this poignant and tender silence.

Though you may not be half as peculiar as I am, if you separate out your vanities and illusions, the petty titles to which you hold fast and by which you are defined, the abstract and insensible money in your accounts, your bogus theories, and your inane triumphs, what have you other than a body that, even if you are now as healthy as a robust, will eventually war against you until you are left with nothing but memory and regret? You may run quadruple marathons and do one-arm handstands, but only blink, look up, and see yourself hobbling about like a bent insect half-crushed under a heavy heel. That's me, who can hardly walk, struggling each day to the highest points of the Parque de Cicada, a thousand feet up in the quiet and the clouds, to green platforms overlooking the sea.

Sometime love is taken away unjustly, but not until the very end do you stop believing, and then it is very bitter. It is bitter because somewhere within you the perfect standard still lives, the pure expectation against which failure and betrayal are contrasted like the dark shadows on a moonlit road.