“Thirty years will pass before I remember that moment when suddenly I knew each man has one brother who dies when he sleeps and sleeps when he rises to face this life,and that together they are only one man sharing a heart that always labours, hands yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?”

“I watch him sleep because the tenderness I have for him is what I have left of everything I started with.My brother was like him, frail blond curls framing a guileless face, he slept the same way, back where I started. A tenderness remembered tangentially, revived when I see this pale, yellow-haired man asleep, at rest, defenseless, incomprehensibly trusting death not to come. We are innocence together, before life set in.Sometimes I feel the tenderness for this man now, the real one asleep, not the memory of the baby brother - sometimes I feel the tenderness so acutely - it balances on just a sliver of memory - I feel it so acutely, it is so much closer to pain than to pleasure or any other thing, for instance, in one second when each knows what the other will say or without a thought our fingers just barely touch, I remember then in a sharp sliver of penetration my baby brother, pale, yellow-haired, curls framing a sleeping face while I lay awake during the long nights, one after the other, while mother lay dying. It is consumingly physical, not to sleep, to be awake, watching a blond boy sleeping and waiting for your mother to die.”

“In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.”

“There is no happiness for him who does not travel, Rohita!Thus we have heard. Living in the society of men, the best man becomes a sinner… therefore, wander!… The fortune of him who is sitting, sits; it rises when he rises; it sleeps when he sleeps; it moves when he moves. Therefore, wander!”

“Every man is enthusiastic at times. One man has enthusiasm for thirty minutes, another man has it for thirty days. But it is the man who has it for thirty years who makes a success in life.”

“Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.”