Jung was absolutely right about one thing. We are occupied by gods. The mistake is to identify with the god occupying you.

How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.

From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.

A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something more than water. There is a plant whose heart, if one cuts it out is replaced with fluid containing herbal goodness. Every morning one can drink the liquid amount of the missing heart.

There was always, he thought, this pleasure ahead of him, an ace of joy up his sleeve so he could say you can do anything to me, take everything away, put me in prison, but I will know [her] when we are old.

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.

When you're writing, it's as if you're within a kind of closed world.