“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.”

“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?”

“The beloved's innocencebrutalizes the lover.As the singing of a mad personbehind you on the trainenrages you,its beautifulanimal-like teethshining amid black planesof paint.As Helenenrages history.Senza uscita.”

“Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.”

“You can get used to eating breakfast with a man in a fedora. You can get used to anything, my mother was in the habit of saying.”

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

“Desire is no light thing.”