In the desert you celebrate nothing but water.

We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.

Over the years, confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.

What he would say, he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He cannot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with ease in the real world. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world.

Sleep is a prison for a boy who has friends to meet.

Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.

He came to this country like a torch on fire and he swallowed air as he walked forward and he gave out light