Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment.

There was always a real reason for everything - why spoons tarnished, and jam furred, and people declined into God, or drink, or card games.

In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and it is this: Is there someone new?

Promiscuity is the death of love.

To live with the work and the letters of James Joyce was an enormous privilege and a daunting education. Yes, I came to admire Joyce even more because he never ceased working, those words and the transubstantiation of words obsessed him. He was a broken man at the end of his life, unaware that Ulysses would be the number one book of the twentieth century and, for that matter, the twenty-first.

shadows of love, inebriations of love, foretastes of love, trickles of love, but never yet the one true love.

it is not good to repudiate the dead because then they do not leave you alone, they are like dogs that bark intermittently at night.