“Desire I think has less to do with possession than with participation, the will to involve oneself in the body of the world, in the principle of things expressing itself in splendid specificity, a handful of images: a lover’s irreplaceable body, the roil and shimmer of the sea overshot with sunlight, a handful of cherries, the texture and weight of a word. The word that seems most apt is partake… We can say we partake of something but we may just as accurately say we take part in something’ we are implicated in another being, which is always the beginning of wisdom, isn’t it- that involvement which enlarges us, which engages the heart, which takes out of the routine limitations of self?”

“Because the golden egg gleamedin my basket once, though my childhoodbecame an immense sheet of darkening waterI was Noah, and I was his ark,and there were two of every animal inside me”

“You can know an animal - or a person, for that matter - in an instant, really, though your understanding can go on unfolding for years.”

“The physical reinvention of the world is endless, relentless, fascinating, exhaustive; nothing that seems solid is. If you could stand at just a little distance in time, how fluid and shape-shifting physical reality would be, everything hurrying into some other form, even concrete, even stone.”

“What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?”

“And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he's gone like a whisper, the easiest breath.”

“Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it.”

“To tell a story is to take power over it.”

“...words can help us to see what is graceful or human where lovelines and humanity seem to fail...”

“A walk is a walk and must be taken; breakfast and dinner come when they are due. The routines of the living are inviolable, no hiatus called on account of misery, spiritual crisis, or awful weather.”

“However much grief I carried, I liked the way my life was tending, these bright new directions. It's only human, to mourn and to reach toward forwardness at once.”