We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.

I didn't know what hate felt like, not the hate that comes after love. It's huge and desperate and it longs to be proved wrong. And every day it's proved right it grows a little more monstrous. If the love was passion, the hate will be obsession. A need to see the once-loved weak and cowed beneath pity. Disgust is close and dignity is far away. The hate is not only for the once loved, it's for yourself too; how could you ever have loved this?

It's hard to remember that this day will never come again. That the time is now and the place is here and that there are no second chances at a single moment.

To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.

Poetry is easier to learn than prose. Once you have learned it you can use it as a light and a laser. It shows up your true situation and it helps you cut through it.

Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.

When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires. No one can legislate love; it cannot be given orders or cajoled into service. Love belongs to itself, deaf to pleading and unmoved by violence. Love is not something you can negotiate. Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation.