“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.”

“You are the most sleepiest man I ever seed.”

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

“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”

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

“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.”

“Talk about it only enough to do it. Dream about it only enough to feel it. Think about it only enough to understand it. Contemplate it only enough to be it.”