Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.

A daydreamer is prepared for most things.

you're an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary otherwise; you have to examine such minerals in the absence of light to discover their beauty, you tell yourself.

Often in gothic novels there's a large house, an estate, and it's symbolic of that culture. Usually it's sort of moldering or rotted or something, and sometimes it's a whole community.

... such speculation is like staring into the hot white sun. you know the sun is there but you can't see a thing.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

The books I read I do enjoy, very much; otherwise I wouldn't read them. Most of them are for review, for the New York Review of Books, and substantial.