If power was a a cry, then human lives were lived in the echo of the cries of others.

What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.

Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.

Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.

I've tried to live without fear. Fear paralyzes you. I've tried to get on with my life.

Life is fury, he'd thought. Fury — sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal — drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy. But never mind about gods! Sara ranting at him represented the human spirit in its purest, least socialized form. This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise — the terrifying human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, self-destructive, untramelled lord of creation.