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21 " Another friend said, I want to write sentences that seem as if no one wrote them. The goal being the creation of a pure delivery system, without the distraction of a style. The goal being a form no one notices, the creation of what seems like pure feeling, not of what seems like a vehicle for a feeling. Language as pure experience, pure memory. I too wanted to achieve that impossible effect. "
― Sarah Manguso , Ongoingness: The End of a Diary
22 " For just a moment, with great effort, I could imagine my will as a force that would not disappear but redistribute when I died, and that all life contained the same force, and that I needn’t worry about my impending death because the great responsibility of my life was to contain the force for a while and then relinquish it. "
23 " I knew I was grown up when I spent time with them and felt not just the weight of my old memories but the weight of theirs, from when they were children. "
24 " One of the great solaces of my life is that I no longer need to wonder whether I’ll have children. "
25 " Today was very full, but the problem isn’t today. It’s tomorrow. I’d be able to recover from today if it weren’t for tomorrow. There should be extra days, buffer days, between the real days. "
26 " All I could see in the world were beginnings and endings: moments to survive, record, and, once recorded, safely forget. I knew I was getting somewhere when I began losing interest in the beginnings and the ends of things. "
27 " I tried to record each moment, but time isn’t made of moments; it contains moments. There is more to it than moments. "