We Commonly Say In The Trade That

When The Course Of Experience Made Me See That There Is No Saviour And No Special Grace, No Remission Beyond The Human, That Pain Is To Be Endured And Fades, If It Fades, Only With Time, Then God Became Nothing To Me But A Dyslexic Dog, With Neither Bark Nor Bite.

Art Is A Gift: You Create And Then You Give Away. How Readers Receive That Gift Is Their Business. If They Hate It, That’s Their Response To It. Others Respond By Liking It. Either Way, That Is Their Interaction With The Book, Which Is No Longer Mine.

Stories--individual Stories, Family Stories, National Stories--are What Stitch Together The Disparate Elements Of Human Existence Into A Coherent Whole. We Are Story Animals.

I Had To Stop Hoping So Much That A Ship Would Rescue Me. I Should Not Count On Outside Help. Survival Had To Start With Me. In My Experience, A Castaway’s Worst Mistake Is To Hope Too Much And To Do Too Little. Survival Starts By Paying Attention To What Is Close At Hand And Immediate. To Look Out With Idle Hope Is Tantamount To Dreaming One’s Life Away.

How Does One Say In The Jargon Of Musicology That My Sould Was Pulled Out Of Me And Thrown Up In The Air, To Be Tossed About By The Music. How Does One Say That I Breathed, That I Existed, In Harmony With The Ups And Downs Of Those Notes. What Kind Of Notes Both Elevate And Cast Down, Exalt And Crush?