Top Highlights

• In the midst of life we are in death,
• Those moments when I was abruptly overtaken by exhaustion are what I remember most clearly about the first days and weeks.
• I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish.
• I have no memory of sirens. I have no memory of traffic.
• The room was cold, or I was. I wondered how much time had passed between the time I called the ambulance and the arrival of the paramedics. It had seemed no time at all (a mote in the eye of God was the phrase that came to me in the room off the reception area) but it must have been at the minimum several minutes.