It's gratifying to know that you've appeared in someone else's dreams. It's proof that you exist, in a way, proof that you have substance and value outside the walls of your own mind.

I sing of a woman with ink on her hands and pictures hidden beneath her hair. I sing of a dog with skin like velvet pushed the wrong way.I sing of the shape a fallen body makes in the dirt beneath a tree, and I sing of an ordinary man who is wanted to know things no human being could tell him.This is the true beginning.

I can't take one breath, not one single breath, without knowing that I love you.

It was September, and there was a crackly feeling to the air. I was saying something that was making her laugh, and I couldn't stop looking at her. It was a little bit chilly, and her cheeks were pink, and her dark hair was flowing around her face. All I wanted for the rest of my life was to keep making her laugh like that. Sometimes our arms brushed against each other as we walked, and it was like I could feel the touch for minutes after it happened.

I remember my wife in white.' It just made people weep to hear it...Everybody just thought it was the saddest sentence that was ever written. And it didn't matter if I never wrote another word. This one sentence had put an end to the need for any future sentences. I had said it all.

There would be hard times, but what did I care if we had hard times? The branches of my love were wide, and they caught the rain and the snow. We would be okay, the two of us together. We would be okay.

For so long, it was just my secret. It burned inside me, and I felt like I was carrying something important, something that made me who I was and made me different from everybody else. I took it with me everywhere, and there was never a moment when I wasn't aware of it. It was like I was totally awake, like I could feel every nerve ending in my body. Sometimes my skin would almost hurt from the force of it, that's how strong it was. Like my whole body was buzzing or something. I felt almost, I don't know, noble, like a medieval knight or something, carrying this secret love around with me.