“A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.”

“Any society that produces twice as many lawyers as it does poets and preachers is doomed.”

“Writing is.... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.”

“Constellations shine with light that was emitted aeons ago, and I wait for something to come to me, words that a poet might use to illuminate life's mysteries. But there is nothing.”

“You have many fine qualities that I admire. But you are out of time. You should have been born a century ago, when values such as yours meant something.”

“In 1,000 pages of Orafoura’s novel, I noticed he repeated one word twice. It really stood out to me. The word? Sit.”