I want what everybody wants, that's how I know I'm still breathing.

Because the golden egg gleamed in my basket once, though my childhood became an immense sheet of darkening water I was Noah, and I was his ark, and there were two of every animal inside me

Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it.

I've been moving a little to the music while I worked ...and then I realize I am actually dancing. It feels wonderful, though I can feel how stiff my muscles are, how rigidly I've been holding myself...Mostly I've been moving cautiously, numbly, steeled because I know, at any moment, I may be ambushed by overwhelming grief. You never know when it's coming, the word or gesture or bit of memory that dissolved you entirely...It happens every day at first, then not for a day or two, then there's a week when grief washes in every morning, every afternoon.

We long to connect; we fear that if we do, our freedom and individuality will disappear.

This is what history is: all those centuries of bodies, moving over these canals, twisting and blooming into life in these houses, these streets; all that flesh hungering, coming together, separating, continuing, accumulating, relinquishing, aging and breaking down. Bodies as tulips bent to the demands of light, colored into blossom, spent.

The physical reinvention of the world is endless, relentless, fascinating, exhaustive; nothing that seems solid is. If you could stand at just a little distance in time, how fluid and shape-shifting physical reality would be, everything hurrying into some other form, even concrete, even stone.