“You are safe with me.""I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.”

“History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself...”

“Good writing is always new.”

“Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.”

“A metamorphosis... The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Larva, pupa, imago. An image of art.”

“The children mingled with the adults, and spoke and were spoken to. Children in these families, at the end of the nineteenth century, were different from children before or after. They were neither...”

“Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches...”

“Of four infernal rivers that disgorge/ Into the burning Lake their baleful streams;/Abhorred Styx the flood of deadly hate,/Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep;/Cocytus, nam'd of lamentation loud...”

“The silences after his last gasp were sung together by a blackbird. I lay there, my eyes unable to close. His were unable to open. I listed the places where I hurt, and how much. My loins felt ripp...”

“Knowing the self is the biggest truth. If we find the truth within, we have found God.”

“This above all: to thine own self be true.”

“What I'm looking for is not out there, it is in me.”