Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition.
All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.
At least half of your mind is always thinking, I’ll be leaving; this won’t last. It’s a good Buddhist attitude. If I were a Buddhist, this would be a great help. As it is, I’m just sad.
Lava bread makes you passionate.
Time isn’t made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.
Consider incompleteness as a verb.
No one will ever make necessity not happen.
Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am.
We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.
Everything depends on liking the people and trusting the people. You have to assume that whatever they do will be as good as you want the thing to be and just go ahead with that.
Life pulls softly inside your bindings. The pod glows – dear stench.
Existence will not stop until it gets to beauty.
It takes practice to shave the skin off the light.
Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.
My brother once showed me a piece of quartz that contained, he said, some trapped water older than all the seas in our world. He held it up to my ear. ‘Listen,’ he said, ’life and no escape.
Beauty makes me hopeless. I don’t care why anymore I just want to get away. When I look at the city of Paris I long to wrap my legs around it. When I watch you dancing there is a heartless immensity like a sailor in a dead-calm sea. Desires as round as peaches bloom in me all night, I no longer gather what falls.
My mother forbad us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them.
Your grief is as great as your splendor was: some god is weighing the one out equal to the other.
There is something maddeningly attractive about the untranslatable, about a word that goes silent in transit.
If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it”.