“Happy, Muriel? No, not happy. Your aim is wrong. There is no such thing as happiness. Life bends joy and pain, beauty and ugliness, in such a way that no one may isolate them. No one should want to. Perfect joy, or perfect pain, with no contrasting element to define them, would mean a monotony of consciousness, would mean death.”

“Thank everyone who calls out your faults, your anger, your impatience, your egotism; do this consciously, voluntarily.”

“Acceptance of prevailing standards often means we have no standards of our own.”

“Dusk, suggesting the almost imperceptible posession of giant trees, settled with a purple haze about the cane. I felt strange, as I always do in Georgia, particularly at dusk. I felt that things unseen to men were tangibly immediate. It would not have surprised me had I had a vision.”

“We learn the rope of life by untying its knots.”

“Her Lips Are Copper Wire”whisper of yellow globesgleaming on lamp posts that swaylike bootleg licker drinkers in the fogand let your breath be moist against melike bright beads on yellow globestelephone the power-housethat the main wires are insulate(her words play up and down dewy corridors of billboards)then with your tongue remove the tapeand press your lips to minetill they are incandescent”

“If you have heard a Jewish cantor sing, if he has touched you and made your own sorrow seem trivial when compared with his, you will know my feeling when I follow the curves of her profile, like mobile rivers, to their common delta.”