“When I am with him, smoking or talking quietly ahead, or whatever it maybe, I see, beyond my own happiness the intimacy, occasional glimpses of the happiness of 1000s of others whose names I shall never hear, and know that there is a great unrecorded history.”

“the punchline is that I’m always running late I’m always running I’m always trying to move time backwards & tell everyone that I love them”

“It must be in part the wordlessness of creatures. Our speech rushes in where there are no words, and in the process we understand that our acts of description are both bridges to animal life and evidence of our distance from them. The very tool we reach for to approach them holds us at bay […] When our imaginations meet a mind decidedly not like ours, our own nature is suddenly called into question. We place our own eye beside that of the fish in order to question our own seeing. Consciousness can’t be taken for granted when there are, plainly, varieties of awareness. The result is an intoxicating uncertainty. And that is a relief, is it not, to acknowledge that we do not after all know what a self is? A corrective to human arrogance, to the numbing certainty that puts a soul to sleep. It’s the unsayability of what being is that drives the poet to speak and to speak, to make versions of the world, understanding their inevitable incompletion, the impossibility of circumscribing the unreadable thing living is. Perhaps the dream of lyric poetry is not just to represent states of mind, but to actually provoke them in the reader.”