“It was always November there.”

“Oh there once was a womanand she kept a shopselling trinkets to touristsnot far from a dockwho came to see what life could befar back on the island.And it was always a party therealways different but very niceNew friends to give you adviceor fall in love with you which is niceand each grew so perfectly from the otherit was a marvel of poetryand irony”

“What name do I have for you?Certainly there is no name for youIn the sense that the stars have namesThat somehow fit them. Just walking around,An object of curiosity to some,But you are too preoccupiedBy the secret smudge in the back of your soulTo say much and wander around,Smiling to yourself and others.It gets to be kind of lonelyBut at the same time off-putting.Counterproductive, as you realize once againThat the longest way is the most efficient way,The one that looped among islands, andYou always seemed to be traveling in a circle.And now that the end is nearThe segments of the trip swing open like an orange.There is light in there and mystery and food.Come see it.Come not for me but it.But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other.”

“We live our lives, made up of a great quantity of / isolated instants / So as to be lost at the heart of a multitude of things.”

“The facts of history have been too well rehearsed (I'm speaking needless to say not of written history but the oral kind that goes on in you without your having to do anything about it). . .”

“The term ignorant is indeed perhaps an overstatement, implying as it does that something is known somewhere, whereas in reality we are not even sure of this: we in fact cannot aver with any degree of certainty that we are ignorant. Yet this is not so bad; we have at any rate kept our open-mindedness -- that, at least, we may be sure that we have -- and are not in any danger, or so it seems, of freezing into the pious attitudes of those true spiritual bigots whose faces are turned toward eternity and who therefore can see nothing.”

“But it is the same thing we are all seeing,Our world. Go after it,Go get it boy, says the man holding the stick.Eat, says the hunger, and we plunge blindly in again,Into the chamber behind the thought”