“The night before, I'd gone overboard with my Lila poems, and maybe it's true that I was hoping that in them he'd see the genius of me, the beauty of my words in his hands.”

“Were there language, I'd be my own lone letter.”

“Here’s another change I’ve noticed: The dark is more than the sun dropping off, more than the moon and the stars. It’s what you can’t see that you hope you will see, what hasn’t been that might be.”

“I hold to fiction as a cure, or partial cure, or cause for hope, or essential distraction from the rain you wake up to, the doubts in your head, the daily desolation that you have not yet said what is most true, you have not yet crafted the story that reveals you. And therefore something waits. Therefore you must wake and you must write and you are not alone.Your fiction is with you.”

“You obsess (but of course you obsess) until the joy is gone from that thing you'd loved, until your fury overwhelms your passion, until you no longer know how to sit with your back against a tree and write poetry that no one will ever see.”

“Beauty is the worst kind of lie.”

“You know how a river goes on and on? That's my love for you.”