Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.

We all got holes in our lives. Nobody dies in a perfect garment.

All through my life I never did believe in human measurement. Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size. I know the grand scheme of the world is beyond our brains to fathom, so I don't try, just let it in.

How come we've got these bodies? They are frail supports for what we feel. There are times I get so hemmed in by my arms and legs I look forward to getting past them. As though death will set me free like a traveling cloud... I'll be out there as a piece of the endless body of the world feeling pleasures so much larger than skin and bones and blood.

When women age into their power, no wind can upset them, no hand turn aside their knowledge, no fact can deflect their point of view.

He despised his body for its boring hungers, reflex anger; its petty, obliterating rage. But now he'd become detached. He regarded his body with a tender regret. It was the thing his spirit had to haul.

I tried out the unfamiliar syllables. They fit. They cracked in my ears like a fist through ice.