“He looked at the walls,Awed at the heightsHis people had achievedAnd for a moment -- just a moment --All that lay behind himPassed from view.”

“You have known, O Gilgamesh,What interests me,To drink from the Well of Immortality.Which means to make the deadRise from their gravesAnd the prisoners from their cellsThe sinners from their sins.I think love's kiss kills our heart of flesh.It is the only way to eternal life,Which should be unbearable if livedAmong the dying flowersAnd the shrieking farewellsOf the overstretched arms of our spoiled hopes.”

“Don't moralize at me! I have no loveFor images, old gods, prophetic words.I want to talk to Utnapishtim!Tell me how.”

“But my hand was too small to do the gathering. [Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 79]”

“As their song crescendoed I had the sudden conviction that the world, which I had considered the province of meaningless chances, a mad dance of atoms, was as orderly as the hexagons in the honeycombs I had just crushed into wax and that behind everything, from Helen's weaving to Circe's mountain to Scylla's death, was a subtle pattern, an order of the most compelling lucidity, but hidden from me, a code I could never crack.”

“I am like a person whose hands were kept numb, without sensation from the first moment of awareness - until one day the ability to feel is forced into them. And I say "Look! I have no hands!" But the people all around me say: "What are hands?”

“Her face looked like a fruit from which all the juice had been sucked.”