The life we live is merely one among several possibilities
My sticky notes from Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer's Life by Michael Greenberg:
On different types of poverty:
Living there was yet another way to subsidize my writing, while I worked in a series of dead-end jobs that stood no chance of threatening my fragile literary identity. By settling in the projects, however, I abdicated my status as a tenement-dwelling artist. We became unglamorously poor.
After a Dec 25th visit to a friend's new workplace on the NYC metro:
The next morning I phone Clarence to thank him for the ride. "I never thought this could happen to me," he says, "Doing what I love on Christmas. And earning double time."
On an abandoned project:
"Notes of an Anti-Traveler," I called it, trying to give a literary burnish to the rut I was in. "9:45 a. m. Twenty-six people on the downtown platform. Rain spilling on to the tracks from a scabrous-looking iron girder. What appears to be a large black clam is sitting in a rising puddle near the third rail. I look harder. It's a cell phone."
On inner lives:
I rehearse Foucault's argument that the presence of madness on our doorstep is good for us, for it reminds us that the life we live is merely one among several possibilities.