“Is it not so presumptuous to write a word? To write a word is to give the word a space all of its own. You build a home for it and hope it can find itself at home among all the other words. Nestled...”

“I would like to do more in appreciating the mindset of the child. Maybe it has something to do with taking ourselves very seriously and with great disregard, as well as having a healthy does of awe...”

“Art allows us to die over and over without actually dying. Only we must catch our breath.”

“Maybe all you need to do is find the heartbeat in everything. And if writing is living, the discovery of the beat of a heart, then when you read me, you are living by my side.”

“If I could simply place the various parts of myself into the night sky to occasionally glance up and behold myselfmaybe in the end I am only hoping to vicariously soak up some starlight.”

“I will treat language with resigned delight, embrace it like unrequited love, offer words to you with a kind of secret shame, for I know that sometimes there is such a thing as too much language, a...”

“To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.”

“art is risk made visible”

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”

“All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit quiet in a room alone.”

“Quiet is here and all in me. ("Dress of White Silk")”

“To imbibe so much quiet is to become the music inside it.”

“The constant reprimands made me hyperconscious of my own performance, and so instead of getting rid of self, I had become embedded in the egoism I was supposed to transcend. Now I was beginning to ...”

“Silence is the mother of truth.”

“Silence is a powerful tool.”