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The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.

A week later, I said to a friend: I don’t think I could ever write about it.

We have mysterious inclinations. No one can explain it to us.

It is this—what you hear when you stop listening—that counts.

What did St. Teresa have in mind when she prayed to be released?

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very Heaven!

Poetry isn’t work, he said, unless you’re talking about reading it.

Death will come for us so fast we will never be able to outrun it.

They say the night watchman is so good he hears the grass growing.

I think of each story as a big circle that’s all around me and I’m in the center.

All my life I have noted that my thinking was atavistic, totemic.

Trysting lovers kissed while breezes fidgeted the leaves.

The horror of the waste appalls me. This beauty. This habitation of dream.

If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you time is a language I don’t speak.

The consensus was that all the great writers drank way too much.

What my father and I destroyed, I take back—kneeling, among the shells.

I could page the women’s voices in their velvet bags bound with string.

That day he stood on some threshold and paused and wept at his choice.

I felt that this maternal oblivion could be the rest of my life.

If there was any magic in his sad life, it happened on that day.

My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature.

The danger with a young contributor is that he may be his own rival.

X wants, but Y gets in the way: the equation of desire and obstacle.

“She was breakable, and I probably knew it from the start.”

It’s not clear that Hemingway completely knew what he was doing.

so this god is only wood and holes, a blank, like the moon’s unlit side.

I found myself wondering what her life had been in her widowhood.

I can already feel the stone’s resistance as I work the first pass.

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the page, are letters up to no good.

“We have heard that this blackened smear is art. We do not see it.”