No one else was there, with the weather like this. If I still lived there, I’d be indoors too. It’s a visitor’s privilege to be foolish.
But as I try and understand how life works – and why some people cope better than others with adversity – I come back to something to do with saying yes to life, which is love of life, however inadequate, and love for the self, however found. Not in the me-first way that is the opposite of life and love, but with a salmon-like determination to swim upstream, however choppy upstream is, because this is your stream...
In the fossil record of our existence, there is no trace of love. You cannot find it held in the earth’s crust, waiting to be discovered. The long bones of our ancestors show nothing of their hearts. Their last meal is sometimes preserved in peat or in ice, but their thoughts and feelings are gone.
Moon’s gravitational pull means that earth doesn’t wobble too much. Scientists call it obliquity. The moon holds us fast.
We know the world by and through our bodies.
Love affairs are discoveries of new worlds.
It never happened, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there to happen. All of that has been a brutal lesson to me in not overlooking or misunderstanding what is actually there, in your hands, now. We always think the thing we need to transform everything – the miracle – is elsewhere, but often it is right next to us. Sometimes it is us, ourselves.
This is the city of disguises. What you are one day will not constrain you on the next. You may explore yourself freely and, if you have wit or wealth, no one will stand in your way. This city was built on wit and wealth and we have a fondness for both, though they do not have to appear in tandem.
I could see in her a piece of the bright hope I once had in myself and it made me sour and angry. It made me feel sorry for her too. I wanted to take both her hands in mine, look her in the eye, and let her see that the world isn’t interested in a little black girl’s dreams.
Fools stay in love. I am a fool.
I would love you as a bird loves flight, as meat loves salt, as a dog loves chase, as water finds its own level. Or I would not love you at all.
Mia madre non voleva che i libri cadessero nelle mie mani. Non aveva previsto che io potessi cadere nei libri, che mi infilassi dentro di loro per stare al sicuro.
Dreams were so tiring that she wondered how anybody ever dared to go to sleep at night.
A good job, money, more money, travel, happiness. Christmas-time swivelled the lens and brought these things into focus. If you had some, all, any of these things you could feel especially pleased with yourself over the twelve days of feasting and family. If you didn’t have some, all, any of these things you felt the lack more keenly. You felt like an outsider.
I love life. Life is too precious to me not to live it fully.
She was such a solitary woman. A solitary woman who longed for one person to know her. I think I do know her now, but it is too late.
Stories are where I live – they are physical three-dimensional places to me. When I was a kid and locked in the coal hole for various crimes, I had a choice: count coal – a limited activity. Tell myself a story – an unlimited world of the imagination.
The heart. Carbon-based primitive in a silicon world.
Being a great poet doesn’t always mean that you write great poetry.
If the sun is shining, stand in it – yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass – they have to – because time passes.