“Because the golden egg gleamedin my basket once, though my childhoodbecame an immense sheet of darkening waterI was Noah, and I was his ark,and there were two of every animal inside me”

“under the radiant towers, the floodlit ramparts, must have wondered at my impulse to touch her, which was like touching myself,the way your own hand feels when you hold it because you want to feel contained.”

“All my life I've lived with a future which constantly diminishes but never vanishes.”

“And now, a heap of rosesbeside the sea, white rugosabeside the foaming hem of shore: brave,waxen candles… And we talkas if death were a line to be crossed.Look at them, the white roses.Tell me where they end.”

“Here and gone. That’s what it is to be human, I think—to be both someone and no one at once, to hold a particular identity in the world (our names, our place of origins, our family and affectional ties) and to feel that solid set of ties also capable of dissolution, slipping away, as we become moments of attention.”

“Intimacy, says the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, is the highest value. I resist this statement at first. What about artistic achievement, or moral courage, or heroism, or altruistic acts, or work in the cause of social change? What about wealth or accomplishment? And yet something about it rings true, finally—that what we want is to be brought into relationship, to be inside, within. Perhaps it’s true that nothing matters more to us than that.”

“And something else, of course; there’s always more, deep in art’s pockets, far down in the chiaroscuro on which these foodstuffs rest: everything here has been transformed into feeling, as if by looking very hard at an object it suddenly comes that much closer to some realm where it isn’t a thing at all but something just on the edge of dissolving. Into what? Tears, gladness—you’ve felt like this before, haven’t you? Taken far inside.”