“The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of starsLetting in the light, peephole after peephole--- A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.--from "Insomniac", written April 1961”

“Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness--how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view of things? This peephole is all I've got!”

“Do you know the difference between a peephole and a people? You can see right through a peephole.”

“No! No! No! My suffering does matter. I want to live! I can't help but mix my life with that of the universe. Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness - how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view I have of things? This peephole is all I've got!”

“But even in the unglamorous warp of the peephole, she looked like a million sunny days to me.”

“you're an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary otherwise; you have to examine such minerals in the absence of light to discover their beauty, you tell yourself.”