Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond—surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjectsto which my predecessors apprenticed themselves.I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention.

We look at the world once, in childhood.The rest is memory.

Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary,imperial joy and sorrow of human existence,the dreamed as well as the lived—what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death?

Even before you touched me, I belonged to you; all you had to do was look at me.

Without thinking, I knelt in the grass, like someone meaning to pray. When I tried to stand again, I couldn’t move,my legs were utterly rigid. Does grief change you like that?Through the birches, I could...

As I saw it, all my mother’s life, my father held her down, like lead strapped to her ankles.She wasbuoyant by nature;she wanted to travel,go to the theater, go to museums.What he wantedwas to lie...

I don’t need your praiseto survive. I was here first, before you were here, beforeyou ever planted a garden.And I’ll be here when only the sun and moonare left, and the sea, and the wide...

Gretel in Darkness:This is the world we wanted.All who would have seen us deadare dead. I hear the witch’s crybreak in the moonlight through a sheetof sugar: God rewards.Her tongue shrivels into gas….Now, far from...

It is true that there is not enough beauty in the world. It is also true that I am not competent to restore it. Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some...

As I turned over the last page, a wave of sorrow enveloped me. Where had they all gone, these people who had seemed so real? To distract myself, I walked out into the night; instinctively,...

Tonight I saw myself in the dark window asthe image of my father, whose lifewas spent like this,thinking of death, to the exclusionof other sensual matters,so in the end that lifewas easy to give up,...

Come to me said the world. I was standingin my wool coat at a kind of bright portal—I can finally saylong ago; it gives me considerable pleasure. Beautythe healer, the teacher—death cannot harm memore than...

I was not prepared: sunset, end of summer. Demonstrations of time as a continuum, as something coming to an end, not a suspension: the senses wouldn’t protect me. I caution you as I was never...

Once I could imagine my soulI could imagine my death.When I imagined my deathmy soul died. ThisI remember clearly.My body persisted.Not thrived, but persisted.Why I do not know.

The master said You must write what you see.But what I see does not move me.The master answered Change what you see.

Living things don’t all requirelight in the same degree. Some of usmake our own light: a silver leaflike a path no one can use, a shallowlake of silver in the darkness under the great maples.But...

Why love what you will lose?There is nothing else to love.

It is very difficult to win. It’s not in my script.