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.
When I began to be published, people got the idea that I should ‘teach writing,’ which I have no idea how to do and don’t really believe in.
I don’t know that we really think any thoughts; we think connections between thoughts. That’s where the mind moves, that’s what’s new, and the thoughts themselves have probably been there in my head or lots of other people’s heads for a long time.
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.
Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.
All myth is an enriched pattern, a two-faced proposition, allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life.
Small, red, and upright he waited, gripping his new bookbag tight in one hand and touching a lucky penny inside his coat pocket with the other, while the first snows of winter floated down on his eyelashes and covered the branches around him and silenced all trace of the world.