"You are like a god, like an immortal one,' she whispered to me one night in our bed, her naked body pressed to mine, our sweat golden and glistening in the candlelight. 'Oh, my love,' I whispered back to her, 'I am more mortal than all. It seems that a part of me dies every night that I lie with you."

"Somewhere I'd heard, or invented perhaps, that the only pleasures found during a waning moon are misfortunes in disguise. Superstition aside, I avoid pleasure during the waning or absent moon out of respect for the bounty this world offers me. I profit from great harvests in life and believe in the importance of seasons."

"I was angry at myself for my inclination to vice. I longed for the day when a state of frenzy would lead my mind to sober pasture, just as it had for Saint Augustine. I longed for the day when the love of one woman would be sacred enough to forget all the rest."

"When a Wanderess has been caged, or perched with her wings clipped, She lives like a Stoic, She lives most heroic, smiling with ruby, moistened lips once her cup of Death is welcome sipped."

"From all that I saw,and everywhere I wandered,I learned that time cannot be spent,It only can be squandered."

"With the need for the self in the time of another / I left my seaport grim and dear / knowing good work could be made / in the state governed by both Hope and Despair."

Idiot, prends cette danse ardente, au lieu de tendre ton bâton.
J'en ai des raisons de voyager encore sur la mer infinie : j'ai perdu l'amour et j'ai bu ma bourse.
Ma belle m'a quitté, j'ai ses haillons pour m'abriter.
Mes gants de vieillard cachent les mains d'un fameux assassin !"

"A girl without braidsis like a city without bridges."

"Fueled by my inspiration, I ran across the room to steal the cup of coffee the bookshelf had taken prisoner. Lapping the black watery brew like a hyena, I tossed the empty cup aside. I then returned to the chair to continue my divine act of creation. Hot blood swished in my head as my mighty pen stole across the page."

"We made love outdoorsWithout a roof, I like most, Without stove, to make love, assuming the weather be fair and balmy, and the earth beneath be clean. Our souls intertwined and gushing of dew."

"There are hours for rest, and hours for wakefulness; nights for sobriety and nights for drunkenness-(if only so that possession of the former allows us to discern the latter when we have it; for sad as it is, no human body can be happily drunk all the time)."

"Women are extraordinary creatures!"

"May a man live well-, and long-enough, to leave many joyful widows behind him."

"I took her to bed with silk and song'Lay still, my love, I won't be long,I must prepare my body for passion.''O, your body you give, but all else you ration..."

"I will always know the glory of the beautiful and rare, as they will know security from labour and prayer. As they will hear the laughter of the children they gave life, I will know the torments of the song born under knife."

"No man sings as beautifully as when his song is accompanied by a woman's voice."

"Spanish rain,A maiden's dress,Apothecary pillsAnd ancient thrills;Melancholy killsA girl's caress."

"Her body accepted my brutal seed and took it to swell within, just as the patient earth accepts a falling fruit into its tender soil to cradle and nourish it to grow. Came a time, just springtime last, our infant child pushed through the fragile barrier of her womb. Her legs branched out, just as the wood branches out from these eternal trees around us; but she was not hardy as they. My wife groaned with blood and ceased to breathe. Aye!, a scornful eve that bred the kind of pain only a god can withstand."

"Ah, youth!It was a beautiful night...The moon was out of orbit.The stars were awry.But everything else was exactlyas it should have been."

"Fortune's fool! How we humans lie upon beauty like lizards upon a sun-baked rock."

"Cities were always like people, showing their varying personalities to the traveler. Depending on the city and on the traveler, there might begin a mutual love, or dislike, friendship, or enmity. Where one city will rise a certain individual to glory, it will destroy another who is not suited to its personality. Only through travel can we know where we belong or not, where we are loved and where we are rejected."

"This was the first time I thought of S- that day. Her music was beautiful, her voice was beautiful, her body was beautiful. Even the dirty little pads of her feet were beautiful. I cursed myself then. For once, heaven had sent me Beauty in its most perfected form and I abandoned it. She might not have been a girl after all but an angel: a force to guide me on this hazardous path of life I hurry down. How can life be hazardous if it can only end in death?"

"If a writer writes something that he or she has never experienced, I think the reader can sense right away that it is garbage. The only thing that can replace experience, though, is imagination; however it takes experience to grow an imagination."

"I've only been to jail a few times, but in several different countries, at that. No, I've only been to jail a few times. But I still claim the ability to write a "serious" novel."

"A girl without braids is like a city without bridges."

"Women writers make for rewarding (and efficient) lovers. They are clever liars to fathers and husbands; yet they never hold their tongues too long, nor keep ardent typing fingers still."

"She is my morning, she is my evening; we have a love that blooms over and again, more beautifully each time than the last. You will see that we are not lovers like others, for whom love is both a punishment and a gift. Our love has never punished, only rewarded. Such love therein lies the eudaimonic life."

"In my errant life I roamedTo learn the secrets of women and men,Of gods and dreams.I've known all the countries of our world,I've lived a thousand lives:Many lives I lived in love, Other lives I squandered.For in my life I never traveled, All I did was wander."

"Be there a picnic for the devil,an orgy for the satyr,and a wedding for the bride."

"She wakes in a puddle of sunlight.Her hands asleep beside her.Her hair draped on the lawnlike a mantle of cloth.I give her my trothfor our love is whole;her breath is my wine,her scent is my soul."

"To wish a healthy man to die is the wish from a mind of sickness. To wish an ailing man to die is the wish of the ambitious."

"I just wish moments weren't so fleeting!' Isaac called to the man on the roof, 'They pass so quickly!' 'Fleeting?!' responded the tilling man, 'Moments? They pass quickly?! . . . Why, once a man is finished growing, he still has twenty years of youth. After that, he has twenty years of middle age. Then, unless misfortune strikes, nature gives him twenty thoughtful years of old age. Why do you call that quickly?' And with that, the tilling man wiped his sweaty brow and continued tilling; and the dejected Isaac continued wandering. 'Stupid fool!' Isaac muttered quietly to himself as soon as he was far enough away not to be heard."

"The birthing wolf,Her heart fed with tenderness,Gave forth from ripe brown nipples,Food to feed the universe."

"We made love outdoors-without a roof, I like most, without stove, my favorite place, assuming the weather be fair and balmy, and the earth beneath be clean. Our souls intertwined and dripping with dew, and our love for each other was seen. Our love for the world was new."

"I've decided the act that cannot wait / is the important will to create / But, ah, if my belly is ignored / the pantry door I shall implore / But I've been known to reach the bed / ideas still famished in my head."

"A 'dreamer' is one possesses the gift of dreaming by day. Sure, many dream at night, but don't also small babies and animals dream at night? To dream by day and dream aloud: Is this not the reward for all the troubles we humans must face?"

"Coffee, my delight of the morning; yoga, my delight of the noon. Then before nightfall, I run along the pleasant paths of the Jardin du Luxembourg. For when air cycles through the lungs, and the body is busy at noble tasks, creativity flows like water in a stream: the artist creates, the writer writes."

"I've seen daggers pierce the chest,Children dying in the road,Crawling things hooked and baited,Rapists bound and then castrated,Villains singed in public square.Yet none these sights did make me cringeLike when my Love cut all her hair."

"A tired man lay down his headin a dusty room so dim,and for so long his wife did shakeand yell to waken him.Meanwhile his thoughts, his dreams, did stirof sandy, red bullfights,of powder-blasts in the airand carnival delights.Yet still his wife was in despairin a dusty room so dim,for she knew death was a whorenot far from tempting him."

"Intoxication, like sexual euphoria, is the privilege of the human animal."

"He had been searching for it his entire life. He had devoted himself to poetry to find it. Now, in the middle of his life, he found it. It was in the face of the love of his life, his daughter. She who had never blushed before, now blushed. And in that blushing, he knew, was the existence of God. That was the day her father learned what God was. God was pure beauty, God was his daughter's face when she blushed."

"I care not that this moment's lot was thin and sparsely dealt all pleasures sweet can be forgot the instant they are felt."

"There was no world, no land, no god or heaven or earth outside of their two bodies naked and trembling in the act of love."

"All that I desire in life are three...A wilderness: A beach on the sun-drenched sea,A puff of opium,And thee."

"Our lips were for each other and our eyes were full of dreams. We knew nothing of travel and we knew nothing of loss. Ours was a world of eternal spring, until the summer came."

"I'm not ashamed of heroic ambitions. If man and woman can only dance upon this earth for a few countable turns of the sun... let each of us be an Artemis, Odysseus, or Zeus... Aphrodite to the extent of the will of each one."

"I saw this moment as attached by threads to eternity and woven between all the other braided moments of my past and my future."

"Sexual frenzy is our compensation for the tedious moments we must suffer in the passage of life. 'Nothing in excess,' professed the ancient Greeks. Why if I spend half the month in healthy scholarship and pleasant sleep, shouldn't I be allowed the other half to howl at the moon and pillage the groins of Europe's great beauties?"

"Rich will be my life if I can keep my memories full and brimming, and record them on clear-eyed mornings while I set joyously to work setting pen to holy craft."

"I was surrounded by friends, my work was immense, and pleasures were abundant. Life, now, was unfolding before me, constantly and visibly, like the flowers of summer that drop fanlike petals on eternal soil. Overall, I was happiest to be alone; for it was then I was most aware of what I possessed. Free to look out over the rooftops of the city. Happy to be alone in the company of friends, the company of lovers and strangers. Everything, I decided, in this life, was pure pleasure."