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

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.

It is for God to fix the time who knows no time.

The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbols never perfectly match. Eros is in between.

Homer must have felt this pressure to come up with an epic poem that would sound totally new to an audience that had loved his previous best-seller.

All myth is an enriched pattern, a two-faced proposition, allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life.

It takes practice to shave the skin off the light.

It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.

Desire is no light thing.

We are only midway through the central verse of our youth when we see ourselves begin to blacken. … We had been seduced into thinking that we were immortal and suddenly the affair is over.

If your way of life is writing, then everything that happens becomes a sentence.

I do think I have an ability to record sensual and emotional facts and factoids, to construct a convincing surface of what life feels like, both physical life and emotional life.

You remember too much,” my mother said to me recently. “Why hold onto all that?” And I said, “where can I put it down?

A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.