The rhyme always knows better than you, and leads you to places where you wouldn't otherwise have gotten to and that is absolutely the case. Leading off from formal poetry, there is something about when you pay attention to form and you allow it to have its own laws and you listen to those laws you really do end up in places you wouldn't otherwise go. Which isn't to say that I believe in following the rules when I write. I don't. Each of the forms in my books feels to me new.

One of us had loved the other more perfectly, had watched the other more closely, and one of us listened and the other hadn’t, and one of us held on to the ambition of the one idea far longer than was reasonable, whereas the other, passing a garbage can one night, had casually thrown it away.

At the end, all that's left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that's why I've never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that's why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived.

There was no one to call me to bed, no one to demand that the rhythms of my life operate in a duet.

Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all.

We search for patterns, you see, only to find where the patterns break. And it’s there, in that fissure, that we pitch our tents and wait.

At first Babel longed for the use of just two words: Yes and No. But he knew that just to utter a single word would be to destroy the delicate fluency of silence.