“The noise of the trees, the breaking of moon into silver fish bouncing off the leaves of asters outside.”

“I'll be looking at the moon, but I'll be seeing you.”

“I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.”

“We are full of anarchy. We take our clothes off because we shouldn't take our clothes off. And we behave worse in other countries.”

“He will hear the rain before he feels it, a clicking on the dry grass, on the olive leaves.”

“All his life he has avoided permanent intimacy. Till this war he has been a better lover than husband. He has been a man who slips away, in the way lovers leave chaos, the way thieves leave reduced houses.”

“Caravaggio was constantly diverted by the human element during burglaries. Breaking into a house during Christmas, he would become annoyed if the Advent calendar had not been opened up to the date to which it should have been.”