Everything is imprinted for ever with what it once was.

Do all lovers feel helpless and valiant in the presence of the beloved? Helpless because the need to roll over like a pet dog is never far away. Valiant because you know you would slay a dragon with a pocket knife if you had to.

You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it” is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?

The most prosaic of us betray a belief in the inward life every time we talk about 'my body' rather than 'I.

Their throats were bare for God.

I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older.

Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.