“You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where can I put it down?”

“I do think I have an ability to record sensual and emotional facts and factoids, to construct a convincing surface of what life feels like, both physical life and emotional life.”

“Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.”

“To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.”

“Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’...”