He is all for double lives, triple lives, lives lived in compartments.
After a certain age, all affairs are serious. Like heart attacks.
The skull, followed by the temperament: the two hardest parts of the body.
When all else fails, philosophize.
But in my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.
Affection may not be love, but it is at least its cousin.
Perhaps we invented gods so that we could put blame on them.
History repeating itself, though in a more modest vein. Perhaps history has learned a lesson.
I might have lived most happily on my island, but who, accustomed to the fullness of human speech, can be content with caws and chirps and screeches, and the barking of seals, and the moan of the wind?
Wine, music: a ritual that men and women play out with each other.
Her own fingernails are none too clean. Country dirt: honourable, he supposes.
Grief past weeping. I am hollow, I am a shell. To each of us fate sends the right disease. Mine a disease that eats me out from inside.
He is not a rubbish person. ... There are no rubbish people. We are all people together.
I will leave behind my terraces and walls. They will be enough. They will be more than enough.
Nothing is forgotten. Nothing I have forgotten is worth remembering.
The heart is the seat of a faculty, sympathy, that allows us to share at times the being of another.
I say – what I mean. I am an old woman. I do not have the time any longer to say things I do not mean.
To be alive is to be a living soul.
There are more important things in life than being prudent.
Ugliness: what is it but the soul showing through the flesh?
Why they chose to cast me away I do not know. But those whom we have abused we customarily grow to hate and wish never to lay eyes on again.
Do the young still fall in love, or is that mechanism obsolete by now, unnecessary, quaint, like steam locomotion?
The more things change the more they remain the same.