“Out of the new arrivals in our lives--the odd word stumbled upon in a difficult text, the handsome black stranger who bursts in one night through the cat door, the telephone call out of a friend's silence of years, the sudden greeting from the girl-child---we constantly make of ourselves our selves.”

“All those years and their moments—Crackling bacon, slamming car doors,Poems tried out on friends,Will be one more archive,One more shaky text.”

“There is a thing that lives in us, eating our food, breathing our air, looking out through our eyes, and when it comes out to play nobody is immune; possessed, we turn murderously upon one another, thing-darkness in our eyes and real weapons in our hands, neighbour against thing-ridden neighbour, thing-driven cousin against cousin, brother-thing against brother-thing, thing-child against thing-child.”

“There will be occasions in each of our lives when we will be called upon to explain or to defend our beliefs. When the time for performance arrives, the time for preparation is past.”

“Our parents don't know us... They can't know us. We hide ourselves from them. Once they knew everything about us and in order to escape them we keep out secrets, our private selves.”

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”