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

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

Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.

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

I am a drop of gold he would say I am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things-

I started to learn Greek when I was in high school, the last year of high school, by accident, because my teacher knew Greek and she offered to teach me on the lunch hour, so we did it in an informal way, and then I did it at university, and that was the main thing of my life.

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.