“So what, ghosts can't hurt you. That's what I thought then.”

“You know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they can't express, and it hurts me. So I go home and burnish it and polish it and weld it to a rhythmic frame, make the dull colors gleam, mute the garish artificiality to pastels, so it doesn't hurt any more: that's my poem. I know what they want to say, and I say it for them.”

“Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.”

“I have told myself you are not allowed to hurt me anymore. That's what hurts the most.”

“There's a space in me. It's a dead space. I know that, because I can't feel anything. But that's what hurts, the nothingness. It's agony.”

“That's what I can't stand. I know I'll bounce back, and that's what I can't stand.”