my witness is the empty sky

hope was my greatest sin

i don’t know how to keep the light from escaping.

hope gleams in the idiot heart

he knew me by heart. it infuriated me that he knew me by heart.

here i am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything i hoped for or imagined. how is it that this safe return brings such regret?

nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when you have only one idea.

january. it was all things. and it was one thing, like a solid door. its cold sealed the city in a gray capsule. january was the moments, and january was a year.

the word ‘nostalgia’ literally means returning home in pain.

in the heating and air conditioning trade, the point on the thermostat in which neither heating nor cooling must operate -- around 72 degrees -- is called ‘the comfort zone.’ it is also known as ‘the dead zone’

we are already past the care of gods. for them our death is the admirable offering. why then delay, fawning upon our doom?

the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new

i think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living.

the biggest human temptation is ... to settle for too little.

we rewrite history all the time, the narratives of our own lives, to explain to ourselves (and others) why things are the way they are. it’s a form of self-protection, I think.

sin’s hate is the best gift that sin bestows.

why tears? because light is beautiful. cecause we do not wish to leave something and stray away into nothing. cecause we have some dim awareness that being alive is better than being dead, which might be nothing, which might be nothingness.

who ever thinks, recalling the face if the one they loved who is gone: yes, i looked at you enough, i loved you enough, we had enough time