“ I used myself, let nothing use me. Like being on a private dole, sometimes more like cutting bricks in Egypt. What life there was, was mine, now and again to lay one hand on a warm brick and touch the sun's ghost with economical joy.”

“Flags are blossoming now where little else is blossomingand I am bent on fathoming what it means to love my country. The history of this earth and the bones within it?Minerals, traces, rumors I am made from, morsel, minuscule fibre, one womanlike and unlike so many, fooled as to her destiny, the scope of her task?One citizen like and unlike so many, touched and untouched in passing…A patriot is not a weapon. A patriot us one who wrestles for the soul of her countryas she wrestles for her own being, for the soul of his country…”

“Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep.”

“and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim uswhich will we claimhow will we go on livinghow will we touch, what will we knowwhat will we say to each other.”

“One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, what it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.”

“I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them.”

“Origins and History of ConsciousnessIII.It’s simple to wake from sleep with a stranger,dress, go out, drink coffee,enter a life again. It isn’t simpleto wake from sleep into the neighborhoodof one neither strange nor familiarwhom we have chosen to trust. Trusting, untrusting,we lowered ourselves into this, let ourselvesdownward hand over hand as on a rope that quiveredover the unsearched…. We did this. Conceivedof each other, conceived each other in a darknesswhich I remember as drenched in light. I want to call this, life.But I can’t call it life until we start to movebeyond this secret circle of firewhere our bodies are giant shadows flung on a wallwhere the night becomes our inner darkness, and sleepslike a dumb beast, head on her paws, in the corner.”