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“And if pornography lures as it appalls, offers you a debased vision of yourself that some part of you yields to, then poetry was my first pornography.”

“James raised his broken hand in a half-greeting. It was discreet, tentative, like they were only strangers. But it was only for Mungo. It was for no one else.
Mungo smiled something small and timid. James returned it, and they let their grins widen slowly, slowly, until Mungo knew what he was going to do, where he was going to go. The only place he would ever want to be.”

“He was watching, and he was waiting, and he was leaving all at the same time.
They stood and regarded each other over the four lanes of traffic. It felt like an eternity. Every time a white van would block his view, Mungo's stomach lurched and he held his breath until it moved again and he was sure the boy was still there, with his packed bags,still watching and waiting. There he was, James-Guid-and-True. ”

“"Cheer up. I love you, Mungo Hamilton." "Don't." Something in him could not stand to be loved. "How no? I can love you if I want."”

“Mungo's capacity for love frustrated her. His loving wasn’t selflessness; he simply couldn't help it. Mo-Maw needed so little and he produced too much, so that it all seemed a horrible waste. It was a harvest no one had seeded, and it blossomed from a vine no one had tended. It should have withered years ago … Yet … it lay about him like ripened fruit and nobody bothered to gather it up.”

“Mungo looked both up and down the hill, and then hekissed James quickly on the lips. It was like hot buttered toast when you were starving. It was that good.”

“A fissure Mungo hadn't known about cracked open in his chest; beneath it was a hollow feeling that had never bothered him before. It was an agony not to raise his own hand and touch the hairs James's fingers had licked. It burned. He wanted nothing more than to feel the warmth left by his touch.”

“Mrs Campbell shuddered as she sighed. "Imagine all that fear and disappointment clogged up in there, and nobody stopped to ask him about it, to ask if he was happy in his life, if he was coping. None of the men could tell ye how they really felt, because if they did, they would weep, and this fuckin' city is damp enough."”

“Without questioning it, Mungo sat up in the bed and oriented himself to lie beside James. He pulled the boy on to his chest and felt the crumpled wetness of his face. He held him, just like Jodie would hold him, and let him remember his mother. It was good to put your weight on someone else, even if it was just for a short while.”

“The real advantage of my situation is that now death becomes the condition and the pawn for my eternal contemplation of Faustine.”

“Faustine's beauty deserves that madness, that tribute, that crime. When I denied that, I was too jealous or too stubborn to admit that I loved her.”

“The final moment must be rapid, confused; we are always so far removed from death that we cannot imagine the shadows that must becloud it.”

“To be on an island inhabited by artificial ghosts was the most unbearable of nightmares; to be in love with one of those images was worse than being in love with a ghost (perhaps we always want the person we love to have the existence of a ghost).”

“Now I understand why novelists write about ghosts that weep and wail. The dead remain in the midst of the living. It is hard for them, after all, to change their habits—to give up smoking, or the prestige of being great lovers.”

“For that puny creature named Macabéa great nature showed itself only in the form of grass in the sewer—were she given the thick sea or the high peaks of mountains, her soul, even more virgin than her body, would go mad and her organism would explode, arms here, intestines there, her head rolling round and hollow at her feet—as you dismantle a wax dummy.”

“Just as nobody one day would teach her how to die: yet she’d surely die one day as if shed learned the starring role by heart. For at the hour of death a person becomes a shining movie star, it's everyone's moment of glory and it's when as in choral chanting you hear the whooshing shrieks.”

“Meanwhile the clouds are white and the sky is all blue. Why so much God. Why not a little for men.”

“I now see that I forgot to mention that for the time being I read nothing for fear of polluting the simplicity of my language with luxuries.
Since as I said the word has to resemble the word, my instrument. Or am I not a writer? Actually I'm more of an actor because with only one way to punctuate, I juggle with intonation and force another's breathing to accompany my text.”

“Before that, I want to declare that this girl doesn't know herself except from living aimlessly. If she was dumb enough to ask herself "who am I?" she would fall flat on her face. Because "who am I?" creates a need. And how can you satisfy that need? Those who wonder are incomplete.”

“Will this story someday become my own congealing? How do I know. If there's any truth in it—and of course the story is true though invented—may everyone recognize it inside himself because all of us are one and he who is not poor in money is poor in spirit or longing because he lacks something more precious than gold—there are those who lack the delicate essential.”

“All the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I don't know why, but I do know that the universe never began.”

“The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair. And as a result of these, a sense of perpetual violation.”

“Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of trouble, attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse of impossibility; for it thinks all things lawful for itself and all things possible. It is therefore able to undertake all things, and it completes many things, and warrants them to take effect, where he who does not love, would faint and lie down.”

“Yet—and yet—in her refusal I also felt relief, as if the weight of want had lifted. I sat down in weeds high as my waist, the night closing round me like two cupped hands. Wondering less about the woman I'd desired than the mystery of my desire itself, how it had made me experience myself as lack and her as fulfillment, all of which were false, mere fictions of my imagination.”

“In resistance to oppression, he realized, there was fear of reprisals, in acquiescence the annihilation of self worth, in fame the fear of humiliation, in strength the fear of enemies, in social stature the fear of slander, in health the fear of illness, in beauty the fear of old age, in scholarship the fear of disputants, in living . . . the certainty of death.”

“For Leonardo the art of seeing—and representing truly what you saw—was at the heart of understanding the material world. And art and science were joined in that perception. The eyes had once been the windows of the soul. With Leonardo they became man's window on the universe. The image was greater than the word because it was more exact, and precision and beauty were the same thing.”

“And how can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?”

“They are all very busy people. ... I do not mean that they work at their jobs all day and night but that they have much business in their minds always that does not let them rest. … The others all have something they hate. And they all have something they love more than eating or sleeping or wine or friendly company. That is why they are always so busy.)”

“Why was it that in cases of real love the one who is left does not follow the beloved by suicide? Only because the living must bury the dead? Bc the measured rites that must be fulfilled after a death? … Or perhaps, when there is love the widowed must stay for the resurrection of the beloved—so that the one who has gone is not really dead, but grows and is created for second time in the soul of the living?”

“Why was it that in cases of real love the one who is left does not follow the beloved by suicide? Only because the living must bury the dead? Bc the measured rites that must be fulfilled after a death? … Or perhaps, when there is love the widowed must stay for the resurrection of the beloved—so that the one who has gone is not really dead, but grows and is created for second time in the soul of the living?”