Beware of thoughts that come in the night. They aren’t turned properly; they come in askew, free of sense and restriction, deriving from the most remote of sources. Take the idea of February 17, a day of canceled expectations, the day I learned my job teaching English was finished because of declining enrollement at the college, the day I called my wife from whom I’d been separated for nine months to give her the news, the day she let slip about her “friend” — Rick or Dick or Chick. Something like that.

— William Least Heat Moon, “Blue Highways”

“You’re still in touch. I guess that’s the test.”

“Barely–barely.”

“A psychiatrist could help. There’s a good man in Albany.”

Finnerty shook his head. “He’d pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” He nodded, “Big, undreamed-of things — the people on the edge see them first.”

— Kurt Vonnegut, “Player Piano”

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always 3 o’clock in the morning.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack Up”