You can get used to eating breakfast with a man in a fedora. You can get used to anything, my mother was in the habit of saying.

Comfortable means gradually more and more flattened down, more and more blunt - less and less sharp and biting into you.

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.

Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.

A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.

Poetry - poiesis means a thing made.

Consider incompleteness as a verb.