'I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got
right off the bat. Some people you just didn‘t get—and never would
get.'

'Relationships in life don‘t really
end, even if you never see the person again. Every person you‘ve been close
to lives on somewhere inside you. Your past lovers, your parents, your
friends, people both alive and dead (symbolically or literally)—all of them
evoke memories, conscious or not. Often they inform how you relate to
yourself and others. Sometimes you have conversations with them in your
head; sometimes they speak to you in your sleep.'

'I thought about how many people
avoid trying for things they really want in life because it‘s more painful to
get close to the goal but not achieve it than not to have taken the chance in
the first place.'

'Now I keep in mind that none
of us can love and be loved without the possibility of loss but that there‘s a
difference between knowledge and terror.'

'Besides,
how can there be an endpoint to love and loss? Do we even want there to
be? The price of loving so deeply is feeling so deeply—but it‘s also a gift,
the gift of being alive. If we no longer feel, we should be grieving our own
deaths.'

'There‘s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn‘t
be ranked, because pain is not a contest.'

'Therapy elicits odd reactions because, in a way, it‘s like pornography.
Both involve a kind of nudity. Both have the potential to thrill. And both
have millions of users, most of whom keep their use private. Though
statisticians have attempted to quantify the number of people in therapy,
their results are thought to be skewed because many people who go to
therapy choose not to admit it.'

'After I left New York, I found the adage about time healing all wounds
to be false: grief doesn‘t fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into
new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never
free from grief. We are never free from the feeling that we have failed. We
are never free from self-loathing. We are never free from the feeling that
something is wrong with us, not with the world that made this mess.'

A lesson in grief.

If I'm not proposed to in this way, I don't want that husband.

'For the reading of these books seems
to perform a curious couching operation on the senses; one sees more
intensely afterwards; the world seems bared of its covering and given an
intenser life.'

'Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no
subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that
you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to
contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and
loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.'

'So long as you write what
you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or
only for hours, nobody can say.'

'Literature is
strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the
opinions of others.'

'The exclamation, to me so surprising—for why was Miss West
an arrant feminist for making a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other sex?—was not merely the cry of wounded vanity; it was a
protest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself. Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the
magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its
natural size.'

'Life
for both sexes—and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement—is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic
courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as
we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as
babes in the cradle.'

'One cannot think well, love well,
sleep well, if one has not dined well.'

'I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.'

'We stand in shit but let us not drown in it.'

'Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.'

'Heavy misfortunes have befallen us; but let us only cling closer to what remains, and transfer our love for those whom we have lost to those who yet live. Our circle will be small, but bound close by the ties of affection and mutual misfortune. And when time shall have sorted your despair, new and dear objects of care will be born to replace those of whom we have been so cruelly deprived.'

'How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!'

'Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind, when it has once seized on it, like a lichen on the rock.'

'Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.'

'Enter the house of mourning, my friend, but with kindness and affection for those who love you, and not with hatred for your enemies.'

'Look at your love for me. It's blind. You don't see me as I really am. All the many nuances of Lika Blum. The light and the dark. You just see the light. You just see what you want to see.'

"You will have to 'trust to luck'. Is that the right expression?"

"It is, but isn't that life for us all? Trusting to luck?"

"You can always try to give luck a helping hand."