One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.

On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.

I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.

She is overtaken by a sensation of unbeing. There is no other word for it.

we become the stories we tell ourselves

Man," he said, "I'm not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want." "What do we want?" I asked blurrily. "Aw, man, you know," he said. "We just want, well, the same things these people wanted." "What was that?" He shrugged. "To live, I guess," he said.

She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.