“One is OneHeart, you bully, you punk, I'm wrecked, I'm shockedstiff. You? you still try to rule the world--thoughI've got you: identified, starving, lockedin a cage you will not leave alive, nomatter how you hate it, pound its walls,& thrill its corridors with messages.Brute. Spy. I trusted you. Now you reel & brawl in your cell but I'm deaf to your rages,your greed to go solo, your eloquentthreats of worse things you (knowing me) could do.You scare me, bragging you're a double agentsince jailers are prisoners' prisoners too.Think! Reform! Make us one. Join the rest of us,and joy may come, and make its test of us.”

“I'm sorry your pretty little world got all screwed up, but everybody's does, and you go on. It's how you go on that defines you.”

“I remember a man, a very lonely man, coming up to me at the end of a reading and looking into my face and saying, 'I feel as if I have looked down a corridor and seen into your soul.' And I looked at him and said, 'You haven't.' You know, Here's the good news and the bad news: you haven't! I made something, and you and I could look at it together, but it's not me; you don’t live with me; you're not intimate with me. You're not the man I live with or my friend. You will never know me in that way. I'm making something, like Joseph Cornell makes his boxes and everyone looks into them, but it's the box you look into; it's not the man or the woman. It's alchemy of language and memory and imagination and time and music and sounds that gets made, and that's different from 'Here is what happened to me when I was ten.”

“They'll try to kill you.""Good thing I'm hard to kill." Only one thing concerned me. "Will you?""Never. I'm the one who will always watch over you. Always be there to fuck you back to your senses when you need it, the one who will never let you die.”

“Crowds have one expression, cruel and fixed. You let yourself be trapped by a look. You let yourself be carried off and shut away in a place of silence. There your eyes may be ripped out, your tongue cut off, and your fingers hammered until the little bones splinter. The walls are splashed with thick clots of blood. Words are the worst kind of dog, they drag us along despite ourselves to somewhere we didn't want to go, they obsess us, they don't let us have a moment's rest, a moment's rest.But before that? Before that is another place altogether. Memory blanks things out methodically. It has several floors, sealed off from one another and there is no passage joining them. One of them is hell. When you fall in, at the very instant you lose your footing, you forget everything, even what light is like. But once you are back in the world you retain only a faint memory of being shut up. It resonates like the dull echo of pain.”

“Go answer your call and then come find me. I'll be waiting for you. Call it hide and seek?""More like hunter and prey baby, because when I find you, I'm going to completely devour you.”

“I'm telling you that you got your facts wrong. I didn't kill your brother. But you killed my mother. You might as well have held the gun to her head!”