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“... NORMA JEANE: Hear that? Living skulls! What are we doing here? What war at Troy? Does anyone care? Gods of love and hate! Aren’t they the same god? All of us, all our lives, searching for the one perfect enemy – you, me, Helen, Paris, Menelaos, all those crazy Greeks! all those hapless Trojans! my dear beloved Jack! Jack and I fought all the time ...”

“... ex-lover 1ex-lover 21 you smell damp, is it raining?2 nice and dry in here1 two hundred seats not even half full2 Japanese film week?1 funny how Americans dislike subtitles2 you said this one’s a film noir?1 what I like about you, baby, is you’re rock bottom2 and what I like about film noir is –1 no one ever reads a book, no one ever cleans t ...”

“... Ibykos fr. 286, Poetae Melici Graeci] In spring, on the one hand, the Kydonian apple trees, being watered by streams of rivers where the uncut garden of the maidens [is] and vine blossoms swelling beneath shady vine branches bloom. On the other hand, for me Eros lies quiet at no season. Nay rather, like a Thracian north wind ablaze with lightning, rushing from Aphrodite accompanied by parching madnesses, black, unastonishable, powerfully, right up from the bottom of my feet [it] shakes my whole breathing being ...”

“... Sky before dawn is blackish green. Perhaps a sign. I should learn more about signs. Turning a corner to the harbour the wind hits me a punch in the face. I always walk in the morning, I don’t know why anymore. Life is short. My shadow goes before me. With its hood up it looks like a foghorn. Ice on the road. Ice on the sidewalk. Nowhere to step. It’s better to step where the little black stones are ...”

“... 9.4. They put stones in their eye sockets. Upper-class people put precious stones. 16.2. Prior to the movement and following the movement, stillness. 8.0. Not sleeping made the Cycladic people gradually more and more brittle. Their legs broke off. 1.0. The Cycladic was a neolithic culture based on emmer wheat, wild barley, sheep, pigs and tuna speared from small boats ...”

“... The fate of the earth. The fate of me. The fate of you. The fate of Faisal. The fate of the court where Faisal will plead his case. The fate of the court’s bias. Every court has a bias. It sifts to the surface gradually. The fate of whomever we drink to after court. The fate of that branch of mathematics that deals with ‘dead-end depth’. The fate of Yemen where Faisal will probably never return ...”

“... Cast: Prometheus, god of Foresight Govt (formerly Zeus), mute part Flare and Stench, two henchman of Govt Ocean, god of oceans Io, woman turned into a cow by jealous wife of Govt Hermes, messenger of Govt Chorus, 50 daughters of Ocean PROMETHEUS: How it begins. A rock wall. Enter Flare and Stench sent by Govt to writhe me (Flare does the work). Sounds of sawing, hammering, harvesting, slaughtering, scrubbing ...”

“... One cold dark night​ there was a story about a knocking at the outer gate. Despite cries of Yes! Yes! Coming! someone still knocked and the snow that had piled on the gate was blown halfway up the door itself, with no meaning as to the blind knocking or the thick snow or why it did not stop. I knew I should be writing a straightforward story, or even a poem, but I didn’t ...”

“... So,​ your life. There it is before you – possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a map – let’s say you’re 25, then you make some decisions, do things, have setbacks, have triumphs, become someone, a bus driver, a professor of Indo-European linguistics, a pirate, a cosmetologist, years pass, maybe in a family maybe not, maybe happy maybe not, then one day you wake up and you’re seventy ...”

“... Once, once somehow I lost both of them, a man was saying as he came out of the elevator that morning. He was alone. He flicked his eyes on me, off me. He had a furtive tinge and a swank black overcoat – I thought at once of Joseph Conrad, as he is in formal photographs, with the not-quite-Western eyes and virtuosic goatee.Once I attended a christening at a farmhouse in a country far away ...”

“... I don’t understand your faces, I don’t understand them. At night I stand at the back of the theatre. I watch you suck in sex, death, devastation, hour after hour in a weird kind of unresisting infant heat, then for no reason you cool, flicker out. I guess for no reason is an arrogant thing to say. For no reason I can name is what I mean. It was a few years ago now I gave you a woman, a real mouthful of salt and you like salt ...”

“... IX. But what word was it Word that overnight showed up on all the walls of my life inscribed simpliciter no explanation. What is the power of the unexplained. There he was one day (new town) in a hayfield outside my school standing under a black umbrella in a raw picking wind. I never asked how he got there a distance of maybe three hundred miles. To ask would break some rule ...”

“... 1. Albertine, the name, is not a common name for a girl in France, although Albert is widespread for a boy.2. Albertine’s name occurs 2363 times in Proust’s novel, more than any other character.3. Albertine herself is present or mentioned on 807 pages of Proust’s novel.4. On a good 19 per cent of these pages she is asleep.5. Albertine is believed by some critics, including André Gide, to be a disguised version of Proust’s chauffeur, Alfred Agostinelli ...”

“... Plato’s Symposium prelude.A symposium was usually a gentleman’s drinking party. This is an unusual one. It has been going on for hours with no drinking. The participants agreed at the outset to forego wine in favour of entertaining one another with speeches in praise of love. Phaidros, Pausanias, Eryximachos, Aristophanes and Agathon have spoken; Sokrates is just subsiding to applause when a knock comes at the door ...”

“... JulioJulio likes to ask a good question in a bad way. Do most of your students fall in love with you? He is a recovering addict but he does not see himself as a statistic, here I am quoting. He describes his novel, which is about the 65th Infantry of Puerto Rico. I watch the clothesline out back, bouncing on the wind with its four frozen shirts.LongLong talks about waking beside a man bleeding from the eyes ...”