“His shelf. Good. Noodle dust. Decaying brain collecting dust. Must insert it back in skull—what was I thinking?”

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, what the hell did thatmean anyway? Was it supposed to be a consoling thought,understanding her mother was now nothing more than decaying fleshand bones?”

“Erudition - dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull”

“If I collected dust, I wouldn’t mind if I got dust on it. My collection would grow and accumulate naturally. Probably my love would blend in with it as well, since I haven’t used it in so long.”

“Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying, ‘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 and couldn’t sleep.”

“Since she seen Fortune head in that big pot Miss Lydia say that room make her feel ill, sick with the thought of boiling human broth. I wonder how she think it make me feel? To dust the hands what use to stroke my breast; to dust the arms what hold me when I cried; to dust where his soft lips were and his chest what curved its warm against my back at night. From the poem "Dinah's Lament" (15)”