In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry.

She struggled with her sadness, but tried to conceal it, to divide it into smaller and smaller parts and scatter these in places she thought no one would find them.

I've reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.

...after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?

When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn't control what came through it.

The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark.

There were many things they simply didn't talk about: between them, silence was not so much a form of evasion as a way for solitary people to exist in a family.

I read differently now, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time. (245)

Henry did not want to be fixed, was somehow convinced that the fix would be a lie, something that would lessen him.

Most of our fears are borrowed. Since that’s the case, we should get busy returning them.

You are a miracle, you are a light. You are not made of our weaknesses but of your strengths. You are a masterpiece made by The Master. Don't see yourself less!

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.

The truth is, you know, we need our anodynes. You know that word, anodynes? We need that in life some times. A good warm bath can be one for you, or a whatever.

I've just got a new house in Pacific Palisades. It's really cute.

What we suffer, what we endure, what we muff, what we kill, what we miss, what we are guilty of, is done by us, as individuals, in private.

in order to make a man or boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

It doesn't matter what anyone else thinks about what's "too much" what's "enough" or if you're telling the "right" stories, just do good work.