“in the nineteenth year and the eleventh monthspeak your tattered Kaddish for all suicides:Praise to life though it crumbled in like a tunnelon ones we knew and lovedPraise to life though its windows blew shuton the breathing-room of ones we knew and lovedPraise to life though ones we knew and lovedloved it badly, too well, and not enoughPraise to life though it tightened like a knoton the hearts of ones we thought we knew loved usPraise to life giving room and reasonto ones we knew and loved who felt unpraisable.Praise to them, how they loved it, when they could.”

“I don’t want to know wreckage, dreck, and waste, but these are the materialsand so are the slow lift of the moon’s belly.over wreckage, dreck, and waste, wild treefrogs calling inanother season, light and music still pouring over our fissured, cracked terrain. If you had known meonce you’d still know me though in a differentlight and life. This is no place you ever knew me.But it would not surprise youto find me here, walking in fog, the sweep of the great oceaneluding me, even the curve of the bay, because as alwaysI fix on the land. I am stuck to earth…these are not the roadsyou knew me by. But the woman driving, walking, watchingfor life and death, is the same.”

“There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet”

“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.”

“We thought we knew everything about him. But that's not how life is. When all's said and done, we can never truly know one another.”

“To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously, to allow what you're reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers, the so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?”

“No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,our animal passion rooted in the city.”