“Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.”

“Safe SexIf he and she do not know each other, and feel confidentthey will not meet again; if he avoids affectionate words;if she has grown insensible skin under skin; if they desireonly the tribute of another’s cry; if they employ each otheras revenge on old lovers or families of entitlement and steel—then there will be no betrayals, no letters returned unread,no frenzy, no hurled words of permanent humiliation,no trembling days, no vomit at midnight, no repeatedapparition of a body floating face-down at the pond’s edge”

“The tree is burning on the autumn noonThat builds each year the leaf and bark again.Though frost will strip it raw and barren soon,The rounding season will restore and mend.Yet people are not mended, but go on,Accumulating memory and love.And so the wood we used to know is gone,Because the years have taught us that we move.We have moved on, the Tamburlaines of then,To different Asias of our plundering.And though we sorrow not to know againA land or face we loved, yet we are king.The young are never robbed of innocenceBut given gold of love and memory.We live in wealth whose bounds exceed our sense,And when we die are full of memory.-from "September Ode”

“The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.”

“[O]ver the years I travelled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying--in the supermarket, these old ladies won't get out of my way--but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances.”

“When I was nineteen,I told a thirty-year-old man what afool I had been whenI was seventeen.'We were always,' hesaid glancing down, 'afool two years ago.”

“When a long-desiredbaby is born, whatjoy! More happinessthan we find in sex,more than we take insuccess, revenge, orwealth. But should the sameinfant die, would youmeasure the horroron the same rule? Griefweighs down the seesaw,joy cannot budget it.”