Favorite moments:

* My eye loved everything it fell upon. And then one day it fell upon a mirror. And he was nowhere in the mirror. And she was everywhere.
* It took months to really reach her through the cloud of myth my adoration made.
* Occasionally, it occurred to you that it might be better to write thea count in the 2nd person: truer to the spirit of that time. You no longer felt that experiences belonged to people in the first place; they were always the outcomes of forces beyond the strictly personal, and only became art at the moment they were made available, if in an altered form, to someone new. The trouble was that you were also embodied, which meant hat you could never quite transcend yourself, or evacuate the frame, or shirk the myth of the grammatical singular.
* You can’t be lonely, after all, if you’re not inside yourself. You can’t be dwelling if you’re somewhere else.
* And an uncanny sense of unity, to love in her what had always seemed deformity in me. To yield. To feel the smugness of the fit. To turn the lock. TO hear the little click.
* His love had been the organizing system of my life. I’d known it since 19. When she would breach its terms, my protean heart would thrash against its skin for what it knew would shelter it. For him.
* it was by remembering how he’d soothed me that I soothed her. And when I held her cheek against my cheek, I was drawing from the well of the love he filled. So I became after all not him exactly but a kind of conduit between them: a conversation they conducted with my mouth. And when I was not unbelievably sad, I was moved unbelievably to hold inside me both my lovers and to introduce them to each other there, in the hollow just above the heart, among the little folds where the voice starts.
* Rachel Hadas wrote that poems and dreams both include unappealing truths that usually elude the person living her daily life in prose.
* for a while you suspected that the world was an invention of your mind—which made it difficult to advance at all across the world, or make the bed…
* In the city, your eyes are for the trees, but in the forest, they seek the silver in everything.
* these different selves—I need you to see them—they were shapes made out of lines, and then one day they all began to cross, the lines, as if by some obscure design the analysis of which became the purpose of my life. Or maybe the pattern was my life, and its analysis merely my living. Sexuality is, after all, a formal concern: finding for one’s time on earth a shape that feels more native than imposed—a shape in which desire, having chosen it, can multiple. And isn’t love itself a type of rhyme? And don’t gender and genre share one root? Maybe I really am a poet, needing as I do from these imperfect sets, which constitute a self, the lie of sense.
* She said it is easy to be avant-garde but it is really difficult to tell a simple story well.
* the narrative impulse might spring from the desire to avoid guilt, rather than from the need… to connect things together in a meaningful way (Rachel Cusk)… stories let us show how lives can interweave… In retrospect, the shape of things looks more entropic—strewn salt—shards of glass—rhapsodic blurs of random light and scraps of songs I can’t rightly call mine, call anyone’s.
* love has been, above all things, the engine of self-knowledge in my life—and even after everything is still what makes the rest worth suffering.