“I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.”

“We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone's eye, we look into a mind.”

“under our love making I felt a bleakness that couldnt be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed”

“I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.”

“Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.”

“The truth is that personality inevitably bleeds into all forms of our intellectual life. We all extrapolate from our own lives in order to understand the world.”

“My father once asked me if I knew where yonder was. I said I thought yonder was another word for there. He smiled and said, "No, yonder is between here and there.”