“In the boundaryless forests, there’re dancers of nude.Yet in the confines of pasture, there’s promise of food.On which is your side?Ô, but tarry and bide,ere you decide,in both do confide.”

“I fear it is my lot, to bide my days in hunchbacked thought, to find what I forgot.”

“It’s not that we have to leave this life one day, it's how many things we have to leave all at once: holding hands, hotel rooms, wine, summertime, drunkenness, and the physics of falling leaves, clothing, myrrh, perfumed hair, flirting friends, two strangers' glance; the reflection of the moon, with words like, 'Soon' ... 'do you want me?' ... '...to lie enlaced' ... 'and sleep entwined' thinking ahead, with thoughts behind...?' Ô, Why!Why can’t we leave this life slowly?”

“I wandered everywhere, through cities and countries wide. And everywhere I went, the world was on my side.”

“What a face this girl possessed!—could I not gaze at it every day I would need to recreate it through painting, sculpture, or fatherhood until a second such face is born. Her face, at once innocent and feral, soft and wild! Her mouth voluptuous. Eyes deep as oceans, her eyes as wide as planets. I likened her to the slender Psyché and judged that the perfection of her face ennobled everything unclean around her: the dusty hems of her bunched-up skirt, the worn straps of her nightshirt; the blackened soles of her tiny bare feet, the coal-stained balcony bricks upon which she sat, and that dusty wrought-ironwork that framed her perch. All this and the pungent air!—almost foul, with so many odors. Ô, that and the spicy night! …Pungency, spice, filth and night, dust and light; all things dark did blossom in sight; flower and bloom, the night has its pearl too—the moon! And once a month it will make the face of this tender girl bloom.”

“If you love my work, you are a good critic. If you do not love my work, you are a 'not good' critic.”

“I’ve decided the act that cannot wait / is the important will to create / But, ah, if my belly is ignored / the pantry door I shall implore / But I’ve been known to reach the bed / ideas still famished in my head.”