At first I saw you everywhere. Now only in certain things, at longer intervals.

The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last.

We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.

Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond— surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjects to which my predecessors apprenticed themselves. I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention.

Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary, imperial joy and sorrow of human existence, the dreamed as well as the lived— what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death?

To raise the veil. To see what you're saying goodbye to.

Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer.