“I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.”

“At this moment, you are seamlessly flowing with the cosmos. There is no difference between your breathing and the breathing of the rain forest, between your bloodstream and the world’s rivers, between your bones and the chalk cliffs of Dover.”

“With every step I took away from her, the movement at my heart and between my legs grew more defined: I felt like a ventriloquist, locking his protesting dolls in to a trunk.”

“All day long we seemed to dawdle through a country which was full of beauty of every kind. Sometimes we saw little towns or castles on the top of steep hills such as we see in old missals; sometimes we ran by rivers and streams which seemed from the wide stony margin on each side of them to be subject of great floods. It takes a lot of water, and running strong, to sweep the outside edge of a river clear.”

“Lost in the forest, I broke off a dark twigand lifted its whisper to my thirsty lips:maybe it was the voice of the rain crying,a cracked bell, or a torn heart.Something from far off: it seemeddeep and secret to me, hidden by the earth,a shout muffled by huge autumns,by the moist half-open darkness of the leaves.Wakening from the dreaming forest there, the hazel-sprigsang under my tongue, its drifting fragranceclimbed up through my conscious mindas if suddenly the roots I had left behindcried out to me, the land I had lost with my childhood—-and I stopped, wounded by the wandering scent.”

“Like wine, Provençal magic had its own distinctive terroir. It was rich and chaotic and romantic. It was a night-magic, confabulated out of moons and silver, wine and blood, knights and fairies, wind and rivers and forests. It concerned itself with good and evil but also with the vast intermediate realm in between, the realm of mischief.”