“If youth is a defect, it is one that we outgrow too soon.”

“One universe, one body...in this urnthe animal night sweats of the spirit burn”

“History has to live with what was here,clutching and close to fumbling all we had -it is so dull and gruesome how we die,unlike writing, life never finishes.”

“My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,a captive as Racine, the man of craft,drawn through his maze of iron compositionby the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre.When I was troubled in mind, you made for my bodycaught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines,the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . .I have sat and listened to too manywords of the collaborating muse,and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,not avoiding injury to others,not avoiding injury to myself--to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction, an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting my eyes have seen what my hand did.”

“Any clear thing that blinds us with surprise,your wandering silences and bright trouvailles,dolphin let loose to catch the flashing fish...saying too little, then too much.Poets die adolescents, their beat embalms them,the archetypal voices sing offkey;the old actor cannot read his friends,and nevertheless he reads himself aloud,genuis hums the auditorium dead.The line must terminate.Yet my heart rises, I know I've gladdened a lifetimeknotting, undoing a fishnet of tarred rope;the net will hang on the wall when the fish are eaten,nailed like illegible bronze on the futureless future.”

“We are poor passing facts.warned by that to giveeach figure in the photographhis living name.”

“We are all old-timers,each of us holds a locked razor.”