#10 Lying down gravely on the beach among the overturned boats, rasp of sand against skin like a promise. That night I sat up to watch you sleep in the grey dawn.

#17 For the longest time I did not want to bring you near my home; I wanted to preserve a place which would hold no memory of you, against the time of your departure.

#18 This is the hard part: the time when thoughts of lips, hands and eyes are no longer enough to sustain attention. The time to lay down your belief that the moment of grace granted to lovers can be prolonged indefinitely. (But your body curves into his in the dark and you feel against your skin his sleeping consciousness like the weight of something precious.) The time to see your lover away from your definitions and your lights.

#20 Anne Carson on orchids: “We live by tunneling for we are people buried alive. To me, the tunnels you make will seem strangely aimless, uprooted orchids. But the fragrance is undying. A Little Boy has run away from Amherst a few Days ago, writes Emily Dickinson in a letter of 1883, and when asked where he was going, he replied, Vermont or Asia.”

"...the treatment of local poetry will prove pivotal: ironic in the sense of how we precisely need its uselessness here, the non-lucrative work of verse will serve as the most reliable touchstone. Poetry, after all, assumes before its enjoyment a basic patience with language – one that discerns a possibility of beauty in private modes of thinking – and a measure of sensitivity to its use. State subsidies for publishing and events such as Wordfeast, a festival of international poetry launched in 2004, may thus be helpful but what is more constructive would always be, for example, revised educational policies that promote the study of literature. The authenticity of a commitment to artistic culture should be defined in such terms, by whether a whole people can move beyond pragmatic and binding notions of worth and choose a broader socio-cultural, as opposed to a politico-economic, body of values. The consequences of their choices are yet again far-reaching: a different concern raised in the same prime-ministerial speech of 1999 and tied too to economic fortunes has been the worrying trend among young Singaporeans to use a cliquish pidgin called Singlish instead of profitable proper English.³³ Official finger-pointing may identify poor influences in families, schools, and the media but an institutional failure to inspire a wider appreciation of English must also assume some blame. Language is not a mere skill to be learnt, a fact quick fixes like a Speak Good English Movement continue to miss; as Thumboo observed before, it needs to be owned in a way that should find the engagement with literary thoughts and explorations central and not tangential.³⁴ Will the gloriously stupid pursuit of common literariness ever be deemed worthwhile in Singapore especially if it demands much schematic back-pedalling, even if it may prove advantageous at length only by accident?"