“I used to walk out, at night, to the breakwater which divides the end of the harbor form the broad moor of the salt marsh. There was nothing to block the wind that had picked up speed and vigor from its Atlantic crossing. I’d study the stars in their brilliant blazing, the diaphanous swath of the milk Way, the distant glow of Boston backlighting the clouds on the horizon as if they’d been drawn there in smudgy charcoal. I felt, perhaps for the first time, particularly American, embedded in American history, here at the nation’s slender tip. Here our westering impulse, having flooded the continent and turned back, finds itself face to face with the originating Atlantic, November’s chill, salt expanses, what Hart Crane called the “unfettered leewardings,” here at the end 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.”