“I may die of earthly love, or of devotion.”

It began as research. I wrote of silences, of nights, I scribbled the indescribable. I tied down the vertigo.

And from that time on I bathed in the Poem Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk, Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam, A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down.

What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.

I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I’d rather remain silent.

Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep in exile?

I shed more tears than God could ever have required.

I found I could extinguish all human hope from my soul.

The only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable.

As I descended into impassable rivers I no longer felt guided by the ferrymen.

I went out under the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal.

Whose hearts must I break? What lies must I maintain? – Through whose blood am I to wade ?

But the problem is to make the soul into a monster

Your memory and your senses will be nourishment for your creativity.

I am alone in possessing a key to this barbarous sideshow.

I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am there.

But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.

What will I be doing in twenty years’ time? I’ll be dead, darling! Are you crazy?

Fascism did not die with Mussolini, he warned. Hitler is finished, but the seeds spread by his disordered mind have firm root in too many fanatical brains.

I don’t want to die, so sometimes I think it would have been better if I had never been born.

When we have lost everything, including hope, life becomes a disgrace, and death a duty.

I have come to the conclusion that the most important element in human life is faith.

George Bush has met more foreign heads of state than I have. But a substantial number of them were dead.

There are so many laws that no one is safe from hanging.

And of course, when you see your brother in the toilet bowl there’s a little voice that say, ‘I wonder where he would go if it hadn’t been for his head.