Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.

I do think that something of the effect I have on people is to put everything on an edge where they're both infatuated with a kind of charmingness happening in the person or in the writing, and also flatly terrified by a revelation or acceptance of revelation that's almost happening, never quite totally happening.

Simply do something else and return to it later to find the problem wasn't a problem at all. Ruptures almost always lead to a stronger project.

Homer must have felt this pressure to come up with an epic poem that would sound totally new to an audience that had loved his previous best-seller.

All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.

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.

He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.