Outside, the night lay coiled in the street, cobra-cold and scaled with stars.
If a man loved me, I would have talked myself into loving him, and I would have loved him very deeply after a while.
Sparrows and cats will live in my shoe, Sooner than I will live with you. Fish will come walking out of the sea, Sooner than you will come back to me.
But what I thought, and what I still think, and always will, is that she saw me. Nobody else has ever seen me – me, Jenny Gluckstein – like that. Not my parents, not Julian, not even Meena. Love is one thing – recognition is something else.
The unicorn halted in her slow, desperate round of the cage, realizing for the first time that the magician understood her speech. He smiled, and she saw that his face was frighteningly young for a grown man-untraveled by time, unvisited by grief or wisdom. “I know you,” he said.
Ravens bring things to people. We’re like that. It’s our nature. We don’t like it.
Ah, love may be strong, but a habit is stronger, And I knew when I loved by the way I behaved.
I feel a whole country growing inside me, thousands of years, millions of people, stupid, crazy, shrewd people, and all of them me. I never felt like that before, I never felt that there was anything inside me, even myself.
He thought, or said, or sang, I did not know that I was so empty, to be so full.
I fear it, for her sake. It would mean that she too is a wanderer now, and that is a fate for human beings, not for unicorns. But I hope, of course I hope.
What is plucked will grow again, What is slain lives on, What is stolen will remain – What is gone is gone.
It’s really not so good to have time. Rush, scramble, desperation, this missed, that left behind, those others too big to fit into such a small space – that’s the way life was meant to be. You’re supposed to be too late for some things. Don’t worry about it.
Who has choices need not choose. We must, who have none. We can love but what we lose – What is gone is gone.
The tune was wailing and mournful, almost flagrantly so, and the total effect was of a heartbroken piccolo being parted forever from its bagpipe lover.
I always say perseverance is nine-tenths of any art – not that it’s much help to be nine-tenths an artist, of course.
Her voice left a flavor of honey and gunpowder on the air.
Beyond the town, darker than dark, King Haggard’s castle teetered like a lunatic on stilts...
Love was generous precisely because it could never be immortal.
Sitting up all night would be pointless if somebody you loved wasn’t sitting up with you, picking out music to play and helping you kill the bourbon. Walking by yourself in the rain is for college kids who think loneliness makes poets.
Wisdom is finding joy in bewilderment.
Her face was a stranger’s face, which was as it should be. Love each other from the day we are born to the day we die, we are still strangers every minute, and nobody should forget that, even though we have to.