Quotes from Bill Hayes

I don't so much fear death as I do wasting life." Oliver Sacks

O: 'The most we can do is to write - intelligently, creatively, critically, evocatively - about what it is like living in the world at this time

2-1-10: A languid Sunday, afternoon turned into evening, evening into night, night into morning. 'I just want to enjoy your nextness and nearness,' O says. He puts his ear to my chest and listens to my heart and counts the beats. 'Sixty-two,' he says with a satisfied smile, and I can't imagine anything more intimate.

Every car on every train on every line holds a surprise, a random sampling of humanity brought together in a confined space for a minute or two - a living Rubik's Cube.

In the middle of the night: "Wouldn't it be nice if we could dream together?" O whispers.

I have come to believe that kindness is repaid in unexpected ways and that if you are lonely or bone-tired or blue, you need only come down from your perch and step outside. New York—which is to say, New Yorkers—will take care of you.

One can be alive but half-asleep or half-noticing as the years fly, no matter how fully oxygenated the blood and brain or how steadily the heart beats. Fortunately, this is a reversible condition. One can learn to be alert to the extraordinary and press pause—to memorize moments of the everyday.

I've suddenly realized what you mean to me: You create the need which you fill, the hunger you sate.

But taking wrong trains, encountering unexpected delays, and suffering occasional mechanical breakdowns are inevitable to any journey really worth taking. One learns to get oneself turned around and headed the right way.

12-27-10 Palace Hotel, San Francisco- Over Christmas In bed, lights out: O: 'Oh, oh, oh...!' I: 'What was that for?' O: 'I found your fifth rib.' In the middle of the night: 'Wouldn't it be nice if we could dream together?' O whispers.

To be a New Yorker is to be away from the city and feel like you are missing something

I cannot take a subway without marveling at the lottery logic that brings together a random sampling of humanity for one minute or two, testing us for kindness and compatibility. Is that not what civility is?

But if pressed, I'd have to say that what I love most about the subways of New York is what they do not do. One may spend a lifetime looking back—whether regretfully or wistfully, with shame or fondness or sorrow—and thinking how, given the chance, things might have been done differently. But when you enter a subway car and the doors close, you have no choice but to give yourself over to where it is headed. The subway only goes one way: forward.

Wouldn't it be nice if there weree a planet where the sound of rain falling is like Bach?" he says. "Yes, Planet Bach," I respond. He smiles -"Yes", he murmurs- picturing it, hearing it.

Take each day as it comes, don't overthink it.

Sad, shocking, horrible, yes," underlining each word, "but..." (Oliver often said that but was his favorite word, a kind of etymological flip of the coin, for it allowed consideration of both sides of an argument, a topic, as well as a kind of looking-at-the-bright-side that was as much a part of his nature as his diffidence and indecisiveness.)

I: "Such a lovely word—why triboluminescence?" O: "I like lightbulbs." This didn't seem to answer my question but I liked it anyway.

O: 'Are you conscious of your thoughts before language embodies them?

I've come to believe that a good cry is like a car wash for the soul

Reckon not upon long life: think every day the last, and live always beyond thy account. He that so often surviveth his Expectation lives many Lives, and will scarce complain of the shortness of his days. Time past is gone like a Shadow; make time to come present—

I suppose it's a cliché to say you're glad to be alive, that life is short, but to say you're glad to be not dead requires a specific intimacy with loss that comes only with age or deep experience. One has to know not simply what dying is like, but to know death itself, in all its absoluteness.

If New York was a patient, it would be diagnosed with agrypnia excitata, a rare genetic condition characterized by insomnia, nervous energy, constant twitching, and dream enactment - an apt description of a city that never sleeps, a place where one comes to reinvent himself

everything. It requires a certain kind of unconditional love to love living here. But New York repays you in time in memorable encounters, at the very least. Just remember: Ask first, don't grab, be fair, say please and thank you, always say thank you—even if you don't get something back right away. You will.

Remember this phrase," Dana tell us: "'The heart feeds itself first.