“I tried hard to imagine my poems or any poems as machines that could make things happen, changing the government, or the economy or even their language, the body or its sensorium, but I could not imagine this, could not even imagine imagining it. And yet when I imagined the total victory of those other things over poetry, when I imagined, with a sinking feeling, a world without even the terrible excuses for poems that kept faith with the virtual possibilities of the medium, without the sort of absurd ritual I'd participated in that evening then I intuited an inestimable loss, a loss not of artworks but of art, and therefore infinite, the total triumph of the actual, and I realized that, in such a world, I would swallow a bottle of white pills.”

“It was better for me when I could imagine greatness in others, even if it wasn't always there.”

“I was in love, and the feeling was even more wonderful than I ever imagined it could be.”

“I can't imagine us saying these things to each other out loud. But even if I can't imagine hearing these words, I can imagine living them. I don't even picture it. Instead I'm in it. How I feel with him here. That peace. It would be so happy, and it makes me sad because it only exists in words.”

“[I]f we could imagine a world without slavery and abolish that institution, then we can face the troubles we have now. . . . Who was it that imagined a world where the Nazis could be defeated?There were those who looked upon that war machine and said: this can and must be destroyed.That resistance . . . began with an act of the imagination. Resistance begins with the imagination.”

“I did things I did not understand for reasons I could not begin to explain just to be in motion, to be trying to do something, change something in a world I wanted desperately to make over but could not imagine for myself.”