“What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning.”

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.

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.

Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.

I learned a new language for it all in the 90s. Which in some ways isn’t bad.

We also try to teach them both Portuguese and Serbian, though English is their primary language.

The 1990s were also when a bunch of the soft-shoe language for race, gender, and class became paramount.

I use the language I use to my friends. They wouldn’t believe me if I used some high-flown literary language. I want them to believe me.

I mean getting people to think about what language actually means before they use it is a good thing.

It’s the sort of subject that always interests me: jealousy and the language of suspicion and guilt. I think it interests people.

She leads us through their unknown world, her gift of language rising up like a delicate string of necessary lights.