“It’s about how love can be so complicated and huge and beautiful, and how there’s enough of it for everyone we ever meet.”

“How can you tell a man there’s nothing to do? I can’t imagine a situation in which there could ever be nothing to do! Do it for mankind and don’t worry about the rest. There’s so much to do that a lifetime won’t be enough, if you look around attentively.”

“I had forgotten this about love: how the simple things- the turn away, the turn towards- could be so complicated, and how the complicated things- the stolen night, the right words- could be so simple.”

“I don't understand how I can know so little about love and how it works. How I can be so bad at it when it's all I've ever wanted.All I've ever known is about leaving or being left.”

“Everyone has it in them to express themselves that fundamental thing that they know they are inside. That rather beautiful afraid person. Which might get translated into aggression, or silence, or shyness, or all kinds of other things. But inside we know that we are huggable and lovable, and we want to love and be loved. That person is yearning for fulfillment. To be the person they know they can be and that’s a constant journey; that’s a process. It’s not acquiring about this thing and then that thing, getting to this place, learning this technique, and finding out how this works. It’s about the fact that other people are always more interesting than oneself. Let’s forget what successful people have in common, if there’s a thing unsuccessful people have in common it’s that they talk about themselves all the time.”

“Poetry is not about how we feel, of course. It’s about how we feel about how we feel. Knowing how we feel about how we feel requires an almost ungodly attentiveness or consciousness—an otherworldly watchfulness and vigilance. As does—maybe? —love?”