“What intelligence a reader has must be exercised in the poetic game of hare-and-hounds, where ellipses mislead those who pursue sweet reasonableness.”

“[I]f every language is inherently capable of expressing every human experience, then the attempts to save an endangered language seems ridiculous.”

“I haven’t got a center. I don’t know where my center is. I don’t know where I’m going to find it.”

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words.”

And in a mishmash of clichés, here’s the lesson I keep on teaching myself as I grow older: that it is more important to be kind than to be right.

So many of Mary Oliver's poems are about surrender, or coming to the very point of breaking, of being broken.

Published in 1984, The Lover by Marguerite Duras is a novel about her childhood and experience living in French-colonial Indochine.

Someone I admire once said that writing is a lonely art. And I have found it to be true. It’s going to be an exhausting, self-deprecating and melancholy journey.

Things I read today.

"You always feel that Edward Hopper is on the verge of saying something, but he hardly does."