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

“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.”

“There are those fortunate hours when the world consents to be made into a poem.”

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

“It's freeing, to think that there's always an aspect of us outside the grasp of speech, the common stuff of language.”

“...in the face of all dangers, in what may seem a godless region, we move forward through the agencies of love and art.”

“The physical reinvention of the world is endless, relentless, fascinating, exhaustive; nothing that seems solid is. If you could stand at just a little distance in time, how fluid and shape-shifting physical reality would be, everything hurrying into some other form, even concrete, even stone.”