What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny.

Language is the soul’s ozone layer and we thin it at our peril.

Poetry springs directly from our primal need and capacity for communication[Poetry] mobilizes such a concentration of devices, such an intensification of language via rhythm, syntax, image and metaphor. Reading it-the best of it-can create another, very different kind of perpetual present, an awareness that can be as ongoing in the soul as the stop-time of trauma.

Where am I when I am involved in a book?

What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny.

The books that matter to me...are those that galvanize something inside me. I read books to read myself.

A book is solitude, privacy; it is a way of holding the self apart from the crush of the outer world.