“You searched through all my poets,From Sappho through to Auden,I saw the book fall from your hands,As you slowly died of boredom.”

“You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, not look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books. You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, you shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.”

“Girls, there are poets who learn from youto say, what you, in your aloneness, are;and they learn through you to live distantness,as the evenings through the great starsbecome accustomed to eternity.”

“I wanted to know what it was like to be a drug addict, and have an eating disorder, and have a loved one die, and fall in love. I saw my friends going through these things, I saw the world going through these things, and I needed to understand them. I needed to make sense of them. Books didn’t make me wallow in darkness, darkness made me wallow in books, and it was books that showed me there is light at the end of the tunnel.”

“From the minute I saw you with the match in your hand I thought I could tell you anything on my mind.You'd be my model, but for words.”

“It is the same with anything - you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can't learn it from a book.”