“We’re talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. Starting over with accuracy.”

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.

One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

Consider incompleteness as a verb.

Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.

I am a drop of gold he would say I am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things.

You doubt God? Well more to the point I credit God with the good sense to doubt me. What is mortality after all but divine doubt flashing over us? For an instant God suspends assent and poof! we disappear.

Simply do something else and return to it later to find the problem wasn’t a problem at all. Ruptures almost always lead to a stronger project.

To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.

Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.

Comfortable means gradually more and more flattened down, more and more blunt – less and less sharp and biting into you.

Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself in the act of making a mistake.

Existence will not stop until it gets to beauty.

You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.

Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am.

Some nights the painful past unexpectedly pushes up through the floorboards like an ugly nightmarish weed, and by doing so

Some pure ideal of a noble life That once seemed possible?

Kinds hearts are here; yet would the tenderest one Have limits to its mercy; God has none.

The Iranians should just stay away from us.

It is God that accomplishes all term to hopes, God, who overtakes the flying eagle, outpasses the dolphin in the sea; who bends under his strength the man with thoughts too high.

What is thinking? It is the activity of searching out what must be true, or cannot be true, in the light of the given facts or assumptions.

Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.

Sleep is a healing balm for every ill.