This now was how she would learn about the world, in sentences at meals; other people’s distillations amid her own vague pain, dumb with itself. This, for her, would be knowledge — a shifting to hear, an emptying of her arms, other people’s experiences walking through the bare rooms of her brain, looking for a place to sit.

She had what's known as inner life and didn't know it. She lived off herself as if eating her own entrails.

“I would like my misery to be translated into the utmost beauty.”

“Memorize places,” his uncle had told him. “Settle your eyes on a place and learn it. See it under the snow, and when first grass is growing, and as the rain falls on it. Feel it and smell it, walk on it, touch the stones, and it will be with you forever. When you are far away, you can call it back. When you need it, it is there, in your mind.”

tremble if God forgets you tremble if God remembers you

“She kept changing back and forth. She kept pretending to die and then being resurrected. She was a strange one. One might say she had a calling. Death and then rebirth. A calling indeed.”

“Please, in all this muddle of life, continue to be a bright and constant star. Just a few things remain as beacons: poetry, and you, and solitude.”