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He possessed a fault common to those of high intelligence, which was that he tended to regard the gift of his intellect as a license of a kind, by whose rarefied authority he was protected, in all circumstances, from ever behaving ill. He considered his moral obligations to be of an altogether different class than those of lesser men, and so rarely felt shame or compunction, except in very general terms.

"There's another barbarism," she said. "Your temper."
"You've never seen my temper."
"Have I not?"
"Never. With you, I'm a civilized man."
"With whom are you uncivilized, one wonders."
"It's not a matter of with whom," he responded. "It's a matter of how far."

When he was with her, a pure and liquid adoration filled the chambers of his heart. Reason is no match for desire: when desire is purely and powerfully felt, it becomes a kind of reason of its own.

He pampered her in all the ways that he was able, but became very hurt when she did not notice the efforts he had made -- and when she did not notice his hurt, he became angry. His anger was both unsustainable and unsustaining; it did not nourish him, as men are sometimes nourished by their own rage. Instead the emotion only diminished him, leaving him all the emptier -- and, therefore, all the more ready to love.

How silently the world revolves, when one is brooding, and alone.

A belief for him was a thirst. Whenever the subterranean waters of his mind were disturbed, he plunged inward, and struggled downward -- kicking strongly, purposefully, as if he wished to touch the mineral depths of his own dark fantasies, as if he wished to drown.

For although a man is judged by his actions, by what he has said and done, a man judges himself by what he is willing to do, by what he might have said, or might have done -- a judgement that is necessarily hampered, not only by the scope and limits of his imagination, but by the ever-changing measure of his doubt and self-esteem.

For one could not put a price upon a treasure, just as one could not purchase mana, and one could not make a bargain with god. Gold was not a treasure -- this he knew. Gold was like all capital in that it had no memory: it's drift was always onward, away from the past.

Shelley often woke up the morning after a sexual encounter with a feeling of manifest exposure, as though she'd been secretly recorded in the act and the recording was now being screened, at high resolution, on her body and across her face. It was a sensation not of shame, but of transgressive near-exhilaration, and that morning she had felt it even more acutely than on the day that she'd had sex for the first time.

"The real choices that you make in your life, the really difficult, defining choices, are never between what's right and what's easy. They're between what's wrong and what's hard."

As he conjured her deliciously inside himself, he realized, all at once, that she would be his acquisition. She would be his venture. She would be the final piece of camouflage. Not these dime-a-dozen, grasping, self-important outrage-mongers, these obsequious nonentities, these small time pseudo-pundits who traded in stupidity and called themselves subversive for shitting where they ate.

He wasn't a different person. She was the one who had changed.

She hated how the divorce had come to quantify her relationships with both her parents, such that one weekend dinner with her mother now placed her one weekend dinner with her father in debt, and every conversation, every holiday, every shared interest, even every congenital resemblance now felt inscribed in a vast ledger of credit and debit that somehow it was her responsibility to balance.

He in no way opposed the fundamental aims of feminism, and indeed would have welcomed, he felt sure, any well-argued point in its favor; but over the course of his twenties, he had found himself increasingly at odds with the prevailing orthodoxies of the contemporary feminist left, which seemed to him to have abandoned the worthy goal of equality between the sexes in pursuit of either naked self-interest or revenge.

She had lived for as long as she could remember in perpetual dread of being dislikeable -- a fate far worse than being disliked, for it encompassed not only her relationships with others, but her private judgements of herself.

Tears feel cold against skin flushed with shame.

"Not superstition. Psychology. It is a scholar's task to find patterns in nature or cycles in history. Initially, it's no different from finding portraits of animals and heroes in the stars. The question is: Have you discovered a preexisting truth? Or have you imposed an arbitrary meaning on whatever it is you're considering?"

Love mercy, the prophets taught. Do justice. There was so much to share! And yet, the history of her home planet was one of almost continual warfare, and with tragic frequency, war's taproot was set deep in fervent religion and unquestioning belief. I don't know what to do, she thought. Even the laws of physics resolve to probabilities. How can I know what to do?

My body is healed, he was asking her to understand; my soul is still bleeding. It's all one thing to me.

She was held in tension just before movement, about to walk back toward the house. Later she would think: If I had turned away, I'd have missed the moment he fell in love.

He would not remember it that way. What he experienced was not so much the beginning of love as a cessation of pain.

That night, he meditated on the absence of magnitude, on the cypher that separates positive from negative, on the nothing, on the No Thing. When such comparisons were made, orgasm became as inexhaustibly beautiful as mathematics, its gradations-- it's inequalities-- sublimely arrayed for the highly aesthete to recognize and appreciate. Art cannot exist without inequality, which is itself established by comparison.

Mistaking bloodless lethargy for calm, she believed as well that she felt no grief. With practice, she told herself, she had come to accept that tears were no remedy for death. Her life had been blessedly unburdened by happiness. When some period of fleeting contentment ended, Sofia did not register it as outrageous, but merely noted a return to life's normal condition. Rain falls on everyone; lightning strikes some.

The origins of the word anger were tied closely to physical suffering. Anger was a chokehold. Anger did not empower you. It sat on your chest; it squeezed your ribs until you felt trapped, suffocated, out of options. Anger simmered, then exploded. Anger was constriction, and the consequent rage a desperate attempt to breathe.

He had the oddest feeling of disappearing as he spoke, of fading into the background of a painting depicting a story which must have been old as history. Perhaps it was the drink, but he was fascinated by the way he seemed to drift outside himself, to watch from the awning as her hiccupping sobs and his murmurs mingled, floated, and became puffs of condensation against the cold stained-glass windows.

He had the oddest feeling of disappearing as he spoke, of fading into the background of a painting depicting a story which must have been old as history. Perhaps it was the drink, but he was fascinated by the way he seemed to drift outside himself, to watch from the awning as her hiccupping sobs and his murmurs mingled, floated, and became puffs of condensation against the cold strained-glass windows.

He had the oddest feelings of disappearing as he spoke, of fading into the background of a painting depicting a story which must have been old as history. Perhaps it was the drink, but he was fascinated by the way he seemed to drift outside himself, to watch from the awning as her hiccupping sobs and his murmurs mingled, floated, and became puffs of condensation against the cold strained-glass windows.

The translator needs to be translator, literary critic, and poet all at once -- he must read the original well enough to understand all the machinery at play, to convey its meaning with as much accuracy as possible, then rearrange the translated meaning into an aesthetically pleasing structure in the target language matching the original. The poet runs untrammeled across the meadow. The translator dances in shackles.

Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium atque ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant.

Robbery, butchery, and theft -- they call these things empire, and where they create a desert, they call it peace.

Nihil sub sole novum.

Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.

Out in the country it was not uncommon to discover that she had slipped away, alone, out to the lake, maybe, or down to the cellar, where once I found her sitting in the big marooned sleigh, reading, her fur coat thrown over her knees. Things would have been terribly strange and unbalanced without her. She was the Queen who finished out our suit of dark Jacks, dark King, and Joker.

I was acutely, achingly conscious that I was alive and young on a beautiful day; the sky a deep painful blue, wind scattering the red and yellow leaves in a whirlwind of confetti. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. Someone-- was it van Gogh?-- said that orange is the color of insanity. Beauty. Terror. We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us.