“When one has suspected a thing for weeks, why is being confronted with stark evidence so much worse?”

“Since when has love ever looked for reasons, or evidence? Why would love bow to the reality of things, when it creates a reality of its own, so much more vivid, wherein everything resonates to the key of the heart?”

“Why did Baudelaire — why does anyone — write poetry, in the teeth of all the evidence that one wants you to do so? No one wants you to write it and having written it in spite of them, no one wants to read it. Above all, no one wants to pay for it. For better or worse, a poem has a hard time turning into a commodity.”

“There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,committed or endured or suspected; there are worse thingsthan not being able to sleep for thinking about them.It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking inand stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse.”

“Not being liked was so much worse than being invisible.”

“Nothing is worse than being alone on the evening of the day when one's cow has exploded.”