Her hand touched me at the wrist. "If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn't you?" I didn't say anything.

all this Beethoven and rain

He will hear the rain before he feels it, a clicking on the dry grass, on the olive leaves.

All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.

So we came to understand that small and important thing, that our lives could be large with interesting strangers who would pass us without any personal involvement.

You must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some creature to be tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors, lies, loose vegetation, pockets of stones.

I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.