“I dreamt a limitless book,A book unbound,Its leaves scattered in fantastic abundanceOn every line there was a new horizon drawn,New heavens supposed;New states, new souls.”

“I dreamed a limitless book,A book unbound,Its leaves scattered in fantastic abundance.On every line there was a new horizon drawn,New heavens supposed;New states, new souls.One of those souls,Dozing through some imagined afternoon,Dreamed these words.And needing a hand to set them down,Made mine.”

“I was cured in my new infamy of all the tired wisdom of age. I would never weary into that tired state again---I swore to myself, I would always be this raw, wet child hereafter...”

“My father used to say: Every bird is one bird, and every book is one book, and every bird and every book is one thing too, under the words and the feathers." He finished with a flourish, as though the meaning of this was self-evident.”

“Let us not neglect the forbidden. Let us not sophisticate ourselves out of the cheap thrill and chill of it: the story told for perversity's sake, and all the better for that; the image created because an artist gets tired of reasons sometimes, and wants to dredge up some picture he's been haunted by, and parade it like a new tattoo. I go with it, readily.”

“We have great cities to visit: New York and Washington, Paris and London; and further east, and older than any of these, the legendary city of Samarkand, whose crumbling palaces and mosques still welcome travelers on the Silk road. Weary of cities? Then we’ll take to the wilds. To the islands of Hawaii and the mountains of Japan, to forests where Civil War dead still lie, and stretches of sea no mariner ever crossed. They all have their poetry: the glittering cities and the ruined, the watery wastes and the dusty; I want to show you them all. I want to show you everything.”

“Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.”