As your lover describes you, so you are.

Why is the measure of love loss?

I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.

I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice.

Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.

And what is enlightenment anyway but delusions we can live with?

A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.

There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won’t complain.

Happiness was still on the other side of a glass door, but at least she could see it through the glass, like a prisoner being visited by a longed-for loved one.

Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door.

is knowledge increasing, or is detail accumulating?

There is nothing when we are gone--at least nothing that means anything to those left behind. Dead is gone. But still we hope.

Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

And you? Now that I have discovered you? Beautiful, dangerous, unleashed. Still I try to hold you, knowing that your body is faced with knives.

It's hard, you know, getting divorced.' Billy gave me a hug. 'Love is hard--whether you got it or you don't.

they think we are children with too much pocket money

was i searching for a dancer whose name i did not know, or was i searching for the dancing part of myself?

my husband, the first time i kissed him he turned into a frog

he couldn’t be expected to become homeless because he was in love

habit being a great binder, i think it is often so that those most in need of change choose to fall in love and then throw up their hands and blame it all on fate.

did i love them? i thought so at the time, though now i have come to doubt it, seeing only that i loved myself through them

But history is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?

Time is a player. Time is part of today, not simply a measure of its passing.

That's the trouble with time. Never happens when it should.