Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.

The man has a theory. The woman has hipbones. Here comes Death.

You remember too much," my mother said to me recently. "Why hold onto all that?" And I said, "where can I put it down?

What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning.

The beloved's innocence brutalizes the lover. As the singing of a mad person behind you on the train enrages you, its beautiful animal-like teeth shining amid black planes of paint. As Helen enrages history. Senza uscita.

A page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains.

Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.