What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone's orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away.

I never really got over the fun of making letters.

It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.

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

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

[Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop.

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.