Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.
I’ve come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn’t.
Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.
We’re talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. starting over with accuracy.
Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.
To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.
Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.
I am kind of a curmudgeonly person, so I don’t gravitate to groups or traditions, which is probably just pretentious of me.
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.
Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me. Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.
Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.
They were two superior eels at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.
What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning.
What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall.
He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
You used to say. “Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.” Madness doubled is marriage I added when the caustic was cool, not intending to produce a golden rule.
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.
Here we go mother on the shipless ocean. Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.
I started to learn Greek when I was in high school, the last year of high school, by accident, because my teacher knew Greek and she offered to teach me on the lunch hour, so we did it in an informal way, and then I did it at university, and that was the main thing of my life.