Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.

I assume my stance, and take back the club, low, slowly; at the top, my eyes fog over, and my joints dip and swirl like barn swallows, I swing. There is a fruitless commotion of dust and rubber at my feet. "Smothered it," I say promptly. After enough lessons the terminology becomes second nature.

Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead?

The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.