“...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...”

“...Heracles was strangely silent. What is he thinking? / Geryon wondered. / Geryon watched prehistoric rocks move past the car and thought about thoughts. / Even when they were lovers / he had never known what Herakles was thinking. Once in a while he would say, / Penny for your thoughts! / and it always turned out to be some odd thing like a bumper sticker or a dish / he'd eaten in a Chinese restaurant years ago. / What Geryon was thinking Herakles never asked. In the space between them / developed a dangerous cloud.”

“Desire is no light thing.”

“I am a drop of gold he would sayI am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things-”

“To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.”

“It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.”