“I want what everybody wants,that's how I know I'm stillbreathing...”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it.”

“What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?”

“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”