I regained my soul through literature after those times I’d lost it to wild-eyed gypsy girls on the European streets.
From all that I saw, and everywhere I wandered, I learned that time cannot be spent. It can only be squandered.
She was so delicate that, while we sat beneath the linden branches, a leaf would fall and drift down and touch her skin, and it would leave a bruise. So as we sat in the afternoon hour, beneath that fragrant linden bower, I had to chase all of the leafs that fell away.
Alexander the Great slept with ‘The Iliad’ beneath his pillow. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ as if it were the sweet body of a woman.
To wish a healthy man to die is the wish from a mind of sickness. To wish an ailing man to die is the wish of the ambitious.
Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose flame will last longer?
They say Alexander the Great slept with ‘The Iliad’ beneath his pillow. Though I have never led an army, I am a wanderer. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ as if it were the sweet body of a woman.
I care not that this moment’s lot was thin and sparsely dealt; all pleasures sweet can be forgot the instant they are felt.
I will always know the glory of the beautiful and rare, as they will know security from labour and prayer. As they will hear the laughter of the children they gave life, I will know the torments of the song born under knife.
I fear it is my lot, to bide my days in hunchbacked thought, to find what I forgot.
It was a time I slept in many rooms, called myself by many names. I wandered through the quarters of the city like alluvium wanders the river banks. I knew every kind of joy, ascents of every hue. Mine was the twilight and the morning. Mine was a world of rooftops and love songs.
The youthful body untouched decays the fastest, for no living hands record its splendor; and here youth and time are wasted.
May a man live well-enough and long-enough, to leave many joyful widows behind him.
I’m not ashamed of heroic ambitions. If man and woman can only dance upon this earth for a few countable turns of the sun... let each of us be an Artemis, Odysseus, or Zeus... Aphrodite to the extent of the will of each one.
When she was a child, my love carried a road-map in her hand the way other girls carried handkerchiefs.
I met Anne in the autumn... Autumn, that wild season when rural men rack orchard trees with sticks and weep with the desire to kiss faraway Demeter’s supple breasts – to set lips to her travel-swollen eyes. They seek goddesses, but I desired only Anne.
Analogies are like lies.
Womankind always seems to be able to see a dozen steps into the future, far ahead of what men are able to see. And they have strength where we do not.
Favoring ‘resolution’ the way we do, it is hard for us men to write great love stories. Why?, because we want to tell too much. We aren’t satisfied unless at the end of the story the characters are lying there, panting.
I didn’t know then that young girls were a sort of poison, infectious to the man of age; and that men of age justly take woman of age to cure themselves of the diseases of youth.