“I’m one-time-only to the marrow of my bones.”

Animals don’t even try to look any different from what nature intended. They humbly wear their shells, scales, spines, plumes, pelts, and down. The conscious impulse to change one’s appearance is found only among humans.

Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still.

Even the worst book can give us something to think about.

Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven’t got even that much, however loveless and boring – this is one of the harshest human miseries.

And whatever I do will become forever what I’ve done.

Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice?

Something doesn’t start at its usual time. Something doesn’t happen as it should. Someone was always, always here, then suddenly disappeared and stubbornly stays disappeared.

We’re extremely fortunate not to know precisely the kind of world we live in. One would have to live a long, long time, unquestionably longer than the world itself.

There is so much Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely.

In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.

I’d have to be really quick to describe clouds – a split second’s enough for them to start being something else.

All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.

Memory at last has what I sought.

I am a tarsier and a tarsier’s son, the grandson and great-grandson of tarsiers, a tiny creature, made up of two pupils and whatever simply could not be left out.

Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.

Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune’s darlings.

The Indians said the bones were those of a race of people three times the size of a man.

Love me to the bone beneath the nerves beyond my mistakes beneath my veins and even as my heart breaks. Love me entirely or not at all.

Sometimes, if you’re lucky, someone comes into your life who’ll take up a place in your heart that no one else can fill, someone who’s tighter than a twin, more with you than your own shadow, who gets deeper under your skin than your own blood and bones.

Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.

I learned that the world didn’t see the inside of you, that it didn’t care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone. It was as simple, as absurd, and as cruel as that.

Your words were cold. I felt them as they crashed through my bones.

Day after day, the echoes of losing you resonate in my bones.

Yeah lets grow old together, But promise me we’ll always have youth in our bones.