Every day he poured his question into her, as you pour water from one vessel into another, and it poured back. Don’t tell me he was painting his mother, lust, etc. There is a moment when the water is not in one vessel nor in the other – what a thirst it was, and he supposed that when the canvas became completely empty he would stop. But women are strong. She knew vessels, she knew water, she knew mortal thirst.
“The sentence, if it is doing every one of its jobs, does not want you to desert it for another. It wants you to peer into each of its words, into the characters that form it, and the sentence wants you to consider the relations, acoustical and otherwise, between one word and another. The sentence wants to slow you down so that you might witness everything the writer has caused to happen inside it. Chance and randomness and accident should have little or no part in what goes on inside the sentence.”
Garielle Lutz