When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.
Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence.
Roughing it builds a boy’s character, but only certain kinds of roughing it.
By telling you anything at all I’m at least believing in you, believe you’re there, I believe you into being. Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are. So I will go on. So I will myself to go on.
Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems.
He’d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.
Things written down can cause a great deal of harm. All too often, people don’t consider that.
Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it’s time for you to become someone else’s past time, and then time folds again.
Perhaps its not the world that is soundless but we who are deaf.
If you want what’s in the package you should at least know how to get the string off, is what I say.
Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.
All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn’t be that hard.
When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?
Despite their cool poses they wear their cravings on the outside, like the suckers on a squid. They want it all.
The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish drying on sand.
Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for trade, we thrive on bones; without them there’d be no stories.
The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn’t want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and date was on them to weight them down.
We battled in secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer fought back because I never won. The only defense was flight, invisibility.
A language is everything you do.