That is what literature offers-- a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.
Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.
Round and round he walked, and so learned a very valuable thing: that no emotion is the final one.
Reading is where the wild things are.
Pillars hold things up, and salt keeps things clean, but it's a poor exchange for losing your self. People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time.
Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks las...
Passion is not well bred.
Moon’s gravitational pull means that earth doesn’t wobble too much. Scientists call it obliquity. The moon holds us fast.
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect.
Love affairs are discoveries of new worlds.
Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... i...
Know thyself,’ said Socrates.Know thyself,’ said Sappho, ‘and make sure that the Church never finds out.
It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big or...
It is not possible to change anything until you understand the substance you wish to change. Of course people mutilate and modify, but these are fallen powers, and to change something you do not under...
If everything I have become were not machine-made I might be able to take the risk of being human with you.
I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.
I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not.
I have set off and found that there is no end to even the simplest journey of the mind. I begin, and straight away a hundred alternative routes present themselves. I choose one, no sooner begin, than...
History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.
He would love her if she were a wolf that tore out his heart. And he wondered what that said about love.