“He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.”

Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.

No need to fear death. There will be a tunnel and light.

Philosophy – hopeless. Yet it gives me hope.

Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.

I don’t read reviews and I don’t know what to do with opinions, so I just lose them. They take up space, they become a process of manufacturing a persona, which I want to avoid.

Here we go mother on the shipless ocean. Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.

Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition.

A page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains.

Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.

Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me. Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.

Caught between the tongue and the taste.

Lava bread makes you passionate.

Love is a good place to situate our distrust of fake women.

They were two superior eels at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.

I never really got over the fun of making letters.

When an ecstatic is asked the question, What is it that love dares the self to do? she will answer: Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.

When the first mechanical clocks were invented, marking off time in crisp, regular intervals, it must have surprised people to discover that time flowed outside their own mental and physiological processes.

In [family snapshots] the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash.

I don’t understand anything about the ballet; all I know is that during the intervals the ballerinas stink like horses.

A guitar is just theoretically built wrong. Each string is an interval of fourths, and then the B string is off. Theoretically, that’s not right, all the strings should be off.

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.