how heaven is a slaughterhouse

I saw the image of my dream lover before my eyes, clearer than life—much more clearly than I could see my own hand. I talked to it, cried before it, cursed it; I called it [...] Beloved and foresaw its ripe, all-fulfilling kiss, called it devil and whore, vampire and murderer. It lured me into the most tender and beautiful dreams, and into vile shamelessness; nothing was too good and precious for it, nothing too low and bad.

“The girls drifts up out of her nightgown and its color. Her wings are fastened onto her shoulders like bandages. The butterfly owns her now. It covers her and her wounds. She is not terrified of begonias or telegrams but surely this nightgown girl, this awesome flyer, has not seen how the moon floats through her and in between.”

"Anyone who has ever tried to recount a dream to someone else is in a position to measure the immense gap, the qualitative incommensurability, between the vivid memory of the dream and the dull, impoverished words which are all we can find to convey it: yet this incommensurability, between the particular and the universal, between the vecu and language itself, is one in which we dwell all our lives, and it is from it that all works of literature and culture necessarily emerge."