Like a child, the earth's going to sleep, or so the story goes. But I'm not tired, it says. And the mother says, You may not be tired but I'm tired

The master said you must write what you see / But what I see does not move me / The master answered Change what you see.

The soul is silent. If it speaks at all it speaks in dreams.

He takes her in his arms He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you But he thinks this is a lie, so he says in the end You're dead, nothing can hurt you which seems to him a more promising beginning, more true.

I think I can remember being dead. Many times, in winter, I approached Zeus. Tell me, I would ask him, how can I endure the earth?

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.

Tonight I saw myself in the dark window as the image of my father, whose life was spent like this, thinking of death, to the exclusion of other sensual matters, so in the end that life was easy to give up, since it contained nothing: even my mother's voice couldn't make him change or turn back as he believed that once you can't love another human being you have no place in the world.