Philosophy - hopeless. Yet it gives me hope.

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

Making is always a slightly hopeful thing because once you've made something, it'll - the world will be different.

To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.

I never really got over the fun of making letters.

Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.