“When I was very young I couldn't watch anything black and white on TV because I knew the people moving were now dust.”

“I was a young black man, light-skinned enough so that four out of five people who met me, of whatever race, assumed I was white.... I was a homosexual who now knew he could function heterosexually.And I was a young writer whose early attempts had already gotten him a handful of prizes....So, I thought, you are neither black nor white.You are neither male nor female.And you are that most ambiguous of citizens, the writer.There was something at once very satisfying and very sad, placing myself at this pivotal suspension. It seemed, in the park at dawn, a kind of revelation--a kind of center, formed of a play of ambiguities, from which I might move in any direction. ”

“I like to watch the news, because I don't like people very much and when you watch the news ... if you ever had an idea that people were really terrible, you could watch the news and know that you're right.”

“Do you know what a poem is, Esther?'No, what?' I would say.A piece of dust.'Then, just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, 'So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.'And of course Buddy wouldn't have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick or couldn't sleep.”

“I couldn't tell you what was happening on the TV screen. My eyes saw the pictures, but could not register what was happening, especially since my eyes kept falling on Luke. I knew that he knew that I was watching him because he grinned and threw a cookie at me without taking his eyes off the screen.”

“Watch me go. Watch me. Because you said i couldn't. Because you thought I wouldn't. Go on, cry now. Cry.”