“In our hip-hop lives we make rhymes we make beats we go big or go home. - Esme from Sister Mischief”

“It's just this: that there are places we all come from-deep-rooty-common places- that makes us who we are. And we disdain them or treat them lightly at our peril. We turn our backs on them at the risk of self-contempt. There is a sense in which we need to go home again-and can go home again. Not to recover home, no. But to sanctify memory.”

“Dear Anna, we will live in a home with no walls, so that everywhere we go will be our home.”

“For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.”

“Our Private RhymeI wish we could go back in time.I thought you'd live forever.I feel I'm only half our rhyme.You left and somehow I must climb back to live without your laughter.Can't we please go back in time?I try to smile, pretend and mimeI'm fine, survived disaster,but know I'm only half our rhyme. Will any spring or summertimeshine without your teasing whisper?I wish we could go back in time.I hope that you'll forgive my whines.I'm trying to be braverSo lonely being half our rhyme.I feel you near. We're intertwined.Your spirit makes me stronger.I know we can't go back in time.I'll strive to be our private rhyme.”

“In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.”