“…I have fallen in love with a painting. Though that phrase doesn’t seem to suffice, not really—rather’s it that I have been drawn into the orbit of a painting, have allowed myself to be pulled into its sphere by casual attraction deepening to something more compelling. I have felt the energy and life of the painting’s will; I have been held there, instructed. And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into it’s brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world.”

“…I have fallen in love with a painting. Though that phrase doesn’t seem to suffice, not really—rather’s it that I have been drawn into the orbit of a painting, have allowed myself to be pulled into its sphere by casual attraction deepening to something more compelling. I have felt the energy and life of the painting’s will; I have been held there, instructed. And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into it’s brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world.”

“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.”