“Desire is no light thing.”

“When I desire you a part of me is gone...”

“You used to say. "Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness."Madness doubled is marriageI addedwhen the caustic was cool, not intending to producea golden rule.”

“Men know almost nothing about desire, they think it has to do with sexual activity or can be discharged that way. But sex is a substitute, like money or language. Sometimes I just want to stop seeing.”

“...some hours later they were downat the railroad tracksstanding close together by the switch lights. The huge night moved overheadscattering drops of itself.”

“Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate...”

“All myth is an enriched pattern,a two-faced proposition,allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life.Hence the notion found early in ancient thought that all poets are liars.And from the true lies of poetrytrickled out a question.What really connects words and things?”