It is possible to be truly mad and to still exist upon scraps of life.
There was, really, nothing you could use as a blueprint for your life, except your past. There was no starting over. There was only picking up the pieces someone had left behind.
The fragments for the past, for me, are not without life.
Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person's life.
What was a life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves of incident.
The hands of every clock are shears, trimming us away scrap by scrap, and every time piece with a digital readout blinks us towards implosion.
I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live.
Our greatest pleasure, surely, is in fragments, just as we derive the most pleasure from life if we regard it as a fragment, whereas the whole and the complete and the perfect are basically abhorrent.
For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments.
