"With shrunken fingerswe ate our oranges and bread,shivering in the parked car;though we know we had neverbeen there before,we knew we had been there before."

"I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me."

"We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young."

"Never pray for justice, because you might get some."

"A bachelor, a studio, those were the names for that kind of apartment. Separate entrance it would say in the ads, and that meant you could have sex, unobserved."

"Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you've made."

"From under the ground, from under the waters,they clutch at us, they clutch at us,we won't let go."

"I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it."

"I need to remember what they look like. I try to hold them still behind my eyes, their faces, like pictures in an album. But they won't stay still for me, they move, there's a smile and it's gone, their features curl and bend as if the paper's burning, blackness eats them. A glimpse, a pale shimmer on the air; a glow, aurora, dance of electrons, then a face again, faces. But they fade, though I stretch out my arms towards them, they slip away from me, ghosts at daybreak. Back to wherever they are. Stay with me, I want to say. But they won't."

"It can't last forever. Others have thought such things, in bad times before this, and they were always right, they did get out one way or another, and it didn't last forever. Although for them it may have lasted all the forever they had."

"I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was."

"But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell burst, the plummet of the car from a bridge."

"If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia."

"Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets."

"Being here with him is safety; it's a cave, where we huddle together while the storm goes on outside. This is a delusion, of course. This room is one of the most dangerous places I could be."

"Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings...but there's something dead about it, something deserted."

"The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them."

"Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow."

"I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary."

"Stan wants to see them work the facial features, especially the smiles. He has a professional interest, from his job at Dimple. The Empathy Model he'd worked on could smile, but it was the same smile every time. Though what else did you need for checking out groceries? Put two eyes on anything and basically it looks like a face."

"To want is to have a weakness."

"I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more."

"Writing poetry is a state of free float."

"Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up."

"I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and just as complicated. But sometimes it's hard to put up with."

"There were a few other moves of his father's he could do without as well - the sucker punches, the ruffling of the hair, the way of pronouncing the word son, in a slightly deeper voice. This hearty way of talking was getting worse, as if his father were auditioning for the role of Dad, but without much hope."

"The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love."

"Life is warped. I'm just in sync."

"I tend to feel if people say they're going to do something, they will, if given the chance."

"I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight."

"Perhaps he was merely being friendly. Perhaps he saw the look on my face and mistook it for something else. Really what I wanted was the cigarette."

"An odd thing souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now."

"Her face is silting up, like a pond; layers are accumulating. Every once in a while, when she can afford the time, she spends a few days at a spa north of the city, drinking vegetable juice and having ultrasound treatments, in search of her original face, the one she knows is under there somewhere; she comes back feeling toned up and virtuous, and hungry."

"No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well."

"It must have been an endless breathing in: between the wish to know and the wish to praise there was no seam."

"They were wrong about the sun.It does not go down into the underworld at night.The sun leaves merelyand the underworld emerges.It can happen at any moment.It can happen in the morning,you in the kitchen going throughyour mild routines.Plate, cup, knife.All at once there's no blue, no green,no warning."

"After they had skated around the pond several times, my father asked my mother to marry him. I expect he did it awkwardly, but awkwardness in men was a sign of sincerity then."

"Like preachers, I sell vision,like perfume ads, desireor its facsimile. Like jokesor war, it's all in the timing.I sell men back their worse suspicions:that everything's for sale."

"That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us."

"As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter..."

"When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning-human meaning, that is-is defined by them. You have to admit that."

"You can never see yourself the way you are to someone else - to a man looking at you, from behind, when you don't know - because in a mirror your own head is always cranked around over your shoulder. A coy, inviting pose. You can hold up another mirror to see the back view, but then what you see is what so many painters have loved to paint - Woman Looking In Mirror, said to be an allegory of vanity. Though it is unlikely to be vanity, but the reverse: a search for flaws. What is it about me? can so easily be construed as What is wrong with me?"

"Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misinterpreted, or else understood all too well by those who hate the message. You never know who your readers might be."

"I want my father to be just my father, the way he has always been, not a separate person with an earlier, mythological life of his own. Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened."

"You know I love you. You're the only one.""She isn't the first woman he's ever said that to. He shouldn't have used it up so much earlier in his life, he shouldn't have treated it like a tool, a wedge, a key to open women. By the time he got around to meaning it, the words sounded fraudulent to him and he'd been ashamed to pronounce them."

"It can't last forever. Others have thought suchthings, in bad times before this, and they were always right, they did get out one way or another, and it didn'tlast forever. Although for them it may have lasted all the forever they had."

"The palliative care nurses welcome him: he's a spot of brightness, they claim he keeps the patients interested in life. "We don't think of the clients here as dying," one of them said to him on his first visit. "After all everyone's dying, just some of us more slowly."

"A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason."

"Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does."

"Here's a health to our Captain, so gallant and freeWhether stuck on a rock or asleep 'neath a treeOr rolled in the arms of some nymph of the seaWhich is where we would all like to be, man!"